After her text, Chen Kexin spent a lot of time mulling over it. Her response speed was half that of normal.
[MeowMeow: … Are you holding grudges? Because I invited you over to the banquet with malicious intent…]
Gu Shishi laughed out loud. She didn’t want to type anymore, so she sent her a voice message.
[You are overthinking this. Other than acquiring the raw materials, I also need to get into the right mindset. I will draw when I have some ideas. Unless you want the mass production kind. That I can do over 100 a day.]
[But I am guessing that you are looking for quality work?]
Small ink painting didn’t take long to do, especially for a skillful artist. As they had copy-painted so many times, they could just keep on drawing without giving it much thought.
Naturally, painting like that would never be spectacular.
At her current level, the limitation on her work was no longer her skills, but the effort required to be poured into a painting as well as the accumulation of her artistic conception.
Just like the windy bamboo that she had drawn today. She spent two and a half hours within the system to observe the bamboo in person.
If it wasn’t the system, it might take her several months or even several years to get to that point though her daily life.
That painting had taken almost all of her mental and physical capacity. She could barely hold up her pen right now.
For the next few days, she could at most do some practice work to slowly recover to her usual mental stage.
[Do you have any specific requests for the fan mounts, fan ribs, and fan pendants? If so, just leave me a message.]
[I am going to rest now. Chat later. Bye!]
Gu Shishi closed out of WeChat after she was done leaving the message and collapsed onto the couch.
Many of her practice work that she streamed she either kept for herself or they were free gifts for others. With the exception of her Little Chicken Eating Rice, she would never use her casual practice work for sale.
That was because it was the emotional release of her frustration toward the boss. It came spontaneously and was a pretty good quality work of hers.
Any other work of that caliber would have to rely on fate.
Gu Shishi collapsed onto the couch as she shook her wrist.
***
As Gu Shishi was relaxing, Chen Kexin, on the other end of WeChat, was very troubled.
“How did it go? What did the guru say? I have to go to a tea party over at Lao Zhao’s next Wednesday. Do you think she will be able to paint another fan before then?”
The kind and sincere voice came from none other than Old Mrs. Chen.
Chen Kexin rubbed her throbbing head.
This was all her own fault!
Why did she ask her to let her know the next time she streamed?
Great. Once she got her message, she couldn’t help but went into her streaming channel.
She was then stunned by the bamboo painting on the fan and couldn’t help but reach out to Gu Shishi over WeChat. One thing after another, she flipped through her friend’s circle, saw the picture of the fan, and, low and behold, it was also seen by her grandmother who happened to stick her head over!
Her grandmother immediately praised it with every phrase that she could come up with and raved about the guru’s talent.
Lastly, she said, “I want to buy it!”
Chen Kexin sighed and said, “She said she needed to adjust her condition before she could paint it and will contact me next week. Mostly likely it won’t be done before your tea party.”
It wouldn’t make it in time for her grandmother to show off again next week.
Old Mrs. Chen felt very regretful upon hearing that but quickly nodded with a smile.
“I have heard in the past that in order to produce a truly spectacular work, the artists need to first gather their qi. They’d need to gather their qi for a while before they start on their work. That way they could pour all of their qi into the work in order to make it spectacular.”
Chen Kexin pursed her lips.
She didn’t see any gathering of qi. She saw her streamed for an hour and painted her entire work in one sitting. And that was after the banquet in the morning…
But she couldn’t possibly say that!
