The Versatile Master Artist-Chapter 49 - 41: Critical Realism

The tip of Gu Weijing’s pen danced across the paper.

"The location of the rectus abdominis is from the pubic symphysis to the rib cartilage, which is between the fifth and seventh muscles. Its function is to stretch the chest. The left muscle is slightly larger than the right, which is likely due to uneven exertion during exercise..."

"In a relaxed state, the spine and scapulae are hidden beneath the skin, but his arm is waving the bills, slightly contracting due to exertion and creating a depression. The large bone supporting the forearm swings around the elbow’s hinge."

He murmured to himself, and the brush in his hand was like a sharp scalpel, swiftly dissecting the man in the bat coat in the photo into strands of flesh and bone.

This is the muscle on the torso.

This is the muscle on the limbs.

These are the lines on the neck,

These are the proportions of the gloved knuckles.

...

Soon, Gu Weijing had a thick stack of drawing paper in his hands.

To test the results, Gu Weijing specifically used art wax paper.

Wax paper is semi-transparent and allows light to pass through. Although the texture is not great and is too smooth, it can be compared to the original after drawing, often used by children to trace pictures in picture books.

Gu Weijing overlapped the drawing papers, placed them in front of the iPad screen, and compared them with the characters in the photos.

The texture of the muscles in each sketch can cleverly coincide with the curves in the photos, appearing sharper and clearer than the photos.

This is the advantage of drawing over photos. Gu Weijing, through anatomical reconstruction of the opponent’s body lines, reached a level of being sourced from reality while transcending reality.

The only flaw was that there were many modified traces in the drawing, with large areas blacked out by the eraser.

The equipment condition for the "Human Anatomy" knowledge card is Tier One sketching, but Tier One sketching is just the most basic requirement.

Gu Weijing couldn’t always draw the desired lines perfectly.

Sometimes, what he thought in his mind was one thing, but the actual expression turned out to be completely different.

This is a typical case of the brain learning but the hands not catching up, like an old inkjet printer with a gear stuck.

Fortunately, by now, Gu Weijing already had an overall impression of the muscle build of this guy in the bat suit.

He was confident that if he redrew it, whether enlarged or reduced, there wouldn’t be much of a problem.

The rest was just waiting for the skills cooldown. Tomorrow, when he could activate his skills, he’d use colored pencils to draw a small-scale colored illustration based on Heporion1077’s requested proportions.

Gu Weijing put down the brush, stretched, and browsed Nutshell for a while. After confirming no suitable clients were commissioning work, he shut down the computer.

He did not stay in the studio practicing sketching as he usually did.

Gu Weijing found that upon reaching the professional level, he seemed to hit a bottleneck, especially in emotional expression.

Adjusting his emotional state during the painting process seemed far more challenging than honing his technical skills with the pen.

Even though he put enough effort into drawing, unfortunately, the emotional gauge needle remained hovering around [Indifferent].

Gu Weijing had emptied his mind with no distractions, but sadly, emotions couldn’t just be enhanced by sitting idly in front of the drawing board.

He wanted to integrate his emotions into his work, but he realized he didn’t even know what emotions he wanted to express.

This troubled Gu Weijing greatly, and only when he activated [Menzel’s Basic Painting Insights] could he achieve a [Simple Works] rating with a focused state.

But that was the limit.

Emotion is like a temperamental child that cannot be forcefully demanded.

It’s like a paradox. Every time Gu Weijing felt he had entered the right state while painting, he’d want to check the emotional gauge. But the moment he thought about it, the needle would swiftly reset to zero in the center.

Originally hovering around [Indifferent], when he paid attention to the emotional gauge, it suddenly shifted to [Perfunctory].

An artist’s pursuit of emotions in painting is like a monkey searching for the moon in the sea. The more deliberate, the more contrary it is.

Conversely, sometimes during his morning runs, he’d feel a stir in his heart when he saw sunshine reflecting on the shimmering Yangon River, birds soaring, and a cruise ship sounding its horn.

This simple scenery moved him.

There were even a few brief moments when the needle on his gauge soared to [Heartfelt], but only for a few seconds, vanishing quickly.

When Gu Weijing rushed home to grab his drawing board and pens for a live sketch at the Yangon River, the feeling vanished instead.

With the gauge reminding him, Gu Weijing decided to have a change of heart.

Among several gauges, the one he used least was the one for converting experience points with wealth.

Firstly, his current income from selling paintings wasn’t high, and he didn’t get many orders on Nutshell.

Exchanging 1000 US dollars for 100 experience points didn’t seem worthwhile.

The same experience points could be earned from a few days of sketch practice or by learning Chinese Painting under Elder Cao.

He’s not a great painter with time worth millions every minute. The exchange gauge didn’t seem cost-effective right now.

Secondly, after getting duped by Clare with the water fund, he became more cautious.

But now, Gu Weijing was thinking further ahead.

This charitable gauge was likely not just about exchanging wealth for experience points in the system’s view.

It was meant to show Gu Weijing that art isn’t only about elegance, luxury, and abstract aesthetics.

Apart from painting portraits for important people, documenting society’s sufferings is also an artist’s social mission.

"Father" and "Barge Haulers on the Volga" are examples of such renowned works.

The Russian critical realism school consisted of people like these. They left the comfort of art academies, departing the amber Moscow palaces, leaving the warm St. Petersburg, traversing Siberia’s vast lands, observing and recording the hardships of Tsarist Russia’s serfs.

This was a peak in Russian art, almost comparable with literary giants like Chekhov, Leo Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky, regarded as the golden era of Russian art.

For art students of Gu Weijing’s generation, though, few possessed such vigor as their predecessors.

Art seemed to revert to the sound of auction hammers.

Gu Weijing hoped he could purchase something to visit the welfare center for some inspiration down the road.

...

The next day, he completed the commissioned Batman illustration. With an understanding of muscle line curves, it was smooth sailing, almost effortlessly.

It might be his most satisfying piece recently.

After sending over the scanned version, the other party indeed didn’t ask for revisions but had other requests.

That Hyperion1077 truly was a bizarre client.

Usually, online illustration commissions only require digital versions and not the original artworks.

After all, with the ocean between them, postage wasn’t cheap, and for a piece costing just ten dollars, the original wasn’t considered precious.

But Hyperion1077 insisted on having the paper version shipped via express air delivery.

Honestly, the shipping cost alone was worth as much as the painting.

"What a peculiar customer."

The customer is God,

After all, he wasn’t covering shipping.

Gu Weijing shrugged, triple-checked that the client would pay for shipping, and booked a DHL pickup service on his phone.

As the illustration traveled across the great ocean, he almost forgot about it soon after.