Draw a circle round her thrice [Flashback]

[Trista]

Summer, 505

Artist was in Trista's nature. And, of course, in her name, albeit with all the letters mixed up. At any rate, she was very interested in learning to better her craft, which was why she was here in her room, sitting by the window, working on a painting.

"Sitting" was an odd word for an Akvatari, but it was as good a description as anything else for what she was doing. Her tail was curled to one side, and she was resting on a low, padded bench. This position enabled her to have her hands free, and offered more stability than trying to hover and paint at the same time.

This particular painting was going to be done in oils. Trista had been to classes in painting almost since she was born, but there was only so much one could learn in a classroom -- what was needed was practice, pure and simple. A fresh canvas was leaning on an easel in front of her, and a palette with fresh paint was at her elbow.

Today's painting was to be a seascape. The view out the window provided a dizzying view of the ocean, at least two hundred feet below, and also included a sliver of beach, north of Abura itself. Before she did anything else, Trista studied the scene intently.

[Trista]

The first thing to do was block out the composition. Trista had decided to include the window in the painting, using it as a device to frame the rest of the picture. Taking a pencil in one hand, she quickly sketched the shape, square on the bottom, with a semicircular top rim. That rim proved to be a little tricky, and it was several erasures later before she was satisfied that she had the curve right.

Next, she worked on the corner of seashore that was visible. She penciled in a line for the shore, and then indicated where two of the larger rocks should be. Now was not the time for exactness, and Trista simply put in a couple of rectangles that she could shape later.

The ocean wasn't easy to indicate detail on, but Trista had some ideas to help her. There was a clear line where the waves began to break, and she indicated this on her canvas. Roughly parallel to this, but further out, she added two more lines; these would be places where she would be able to outline other swells.

Finally, there was the sky. It was a clear day today, but Trista wanted something with more interest to it than a flat blue sky. Again using only rough rectangles, she blocked in a line of clouds just above the horizon and, off to the right, a developing cumulonimbus -- or at least a sketchy cylinder that would eventually become a cumulonimbus.

Trista squinted a bit and looked at the canvas as a whole. It seemed to have interest without being overcrowded, and to be reasonably well-balanced. This meant that she was ready for the next step.

[Trista]

The Akvatari traded her pencil for a pen, which she dipped in a nearby inkpot. Slowly, she began tracing the outlines again, but this time using more realistic shapes. Once upon a time, she would have done the full drawing in pencil, then done it over again in ink, but she was confident enough in her drawing ability now to skip that step every now and then.

She didn't spend too much time on the ocean itself, preferring to leave that level of detail for later. But she did outline the breakers, and shape the rocks to something approaching their real level of cragginess. The clouds too were much more detailed, their fluffs and folds fully rounded.

**********

Once the ink drawing was done, Trista took a break to let it dry. She was hungry, and so she flew out of her room and dove into the sea. A thick bed of kelp awaited her, and she ate several pieces, tearing the leaves off with her teeth. She also caught a fish, a slow-moving flounder, and ate it as well. Raw, of course -- Akvatari had simple tastes and iron stomachs, and it probably wasn't one in a hundred of them who even knew how to cook a fish.

The air dried her fur and skin as she flew back to her room and settled in for the next step. For the first time, she picked up a brush -- a relatively thick one with broad, flat bristles. The next thing she had to do was coat the canvas in the first layer, the imprimatura. She chose a flat olive color, mixing it with enough white to make sure it was light enough to allow her to fill in the clouds later on.

Her strokes quickly filled the canvas. Putting on the imprimatura was the phase of the painting that was perhaps the easiest, and she regarded her work with half a smile. The ink was still clearly visible, although the oils had wiped away the pencil marks.

Now she would have to let it dry. Trista put her supplies away, and then stretched out on the floor to sleep.

[Trista]

Enough time had passed that Trista could safely apply the next layer. She spread a thin coat of nut oil over the surface first; her teacher had told her that it helped the paint to layer better.

The next layer, the underlayer, was usually some sort of brown. Trista, after some thought, had decided to vary that a bit and go with a medium blue, mixed with just a hint of red. It was close to the color that she wanted the darkest bits of the sea to be, and it was much easier to make the highlights lighter later on than to try and get the dark areas darker.

The light areas -- the clouds and the sandy beach especially -- she left alone. Those would be properly colored with later layers. The sky she did separately, with a lighter blue. The rocks, beach, and clouds were now negative space, hemmed in by the colors of the sea and sky.

That was enough for now. Again, she had to let the painting dry, and only then would she be able to proceed to the next step.

[Trista]

When Trista judged the painting to be ready for more work, she again coated it first with nut oil. Then she went to the next layer.

She mixed a blue, a white, and a small amount of black to make a somber blue-gray. Using this color on a paint knife, she created rows of waves on the surface of the sea. At the point of the breakers, she widened the line and extended the curves, the better to give it the impression of surf.

Once satisfied with this, she mixed a somewhat lighter version of the blue-gray. Using this pigment, she began sculpting the folds of the clouds. She tried to make them mirror those of the sea, at least subtly, to give the composition more unity.

Last, she had to do the rocks and sand. This required the white again, but mixed this time with a brown and a yellow. There was less detail in the beach, but still, she tried to give it some texture.

When this was done, Trista was ready to stop and let the canvas dry.

[Trista]

Enough time had passed that Trista felt she was ready to start work on this canvas again. She had other canvases around her room in varying states of completion now -- since you couldn't finish an oil painting in one sitting, or two, or three, it was helpful to be working on more than one at a time. There were drawings too, and even watercolors; Trista was too driven to settle for just one medium.

The nut oil coating was put on, and then Trista began to work again. It was time to do more detail now, adding color and depth to the already established shapes.

Using a nearly pure white, mixed with only a small amount of blue, she added foam, surf, and other surface features to the ocean with a small brush. She also took a deep blue, mixed it with green, and used the resulting color to add shading to the spaces between the waves.

A similar process enabled her to put more detail on the sky. The clouds didn't need as much color, obviously, but using a lighter gray, she was able to put more definition into their surfaces. A light yellow, mixed with brown, also allowed her to put highlights on the sand and on the rocks.

She worked for hours, not stopping to eat, hardly even stopping to think. It was long past sundown, and the natural light in the room had been replaced by the yellow glow of an oil lamp, before she finally looked at the landscape and considered that it was done for now. It had been a learning experience -- as painful as it was, she might have used three layers rather than two for the sand if she were to do it over -- but the result was a work of art, and Trista was, in a quiet way, proud of it.

She dipped a brush in a pot of black ink and wrote her name in the lower right-hand corner. Then she packed up her supplies and fell contentedly to sleep.

[Trista]

A year had passed. The painting had been carefully stored for that entire time, and when Trista finally got it out again, she had almost forgotten what it looked like.

It was only after this amount of time that the painting was finally dry and set enough for its final coat. There was no pigment to add, however; this was simply the varnish, a clear coat that would protect and seal the painting away from the elements.

It was a fairly simple process, and it didn't take Trista much time to get it done. She set it on an easel to dry and went back about her business.

[Trista]

She liked this painting, and thought for a while about hanging it up in her room. But Abura was a place where art was the most competitive arena in existence, and it would be better for her career if more people were to see a piece she was particularly proud of.

In the end, she ended up donating it to the Lemanychol Art Gallery. The exposure that she would get was worth the pain of not getting any money for her months of work. Plus, there was the satisfaction of knowing that people would be able to see the results of her technique and emotions.

Now, it was time for another project...

[Gossamer]

Experience: 3 XP painting, 2 XP drawing Lore: Mixing pigments for painting Kill Record: Lots of dead pigments Additional Notes: Nice painting hanging in the Lemanychol Art Gallery