Chapter 78: My First Experience with a Life Portrait
"It's finished!"
Guanghui put down his brush and spent more than half an hour finishing the portrait. Xiaohe leaned back in her chair, exhausted, and nudged Mao Xiaoye with both hands. Lin Xiushui took the painting paper with both hands and went to the eaves on the second floor to look at it in the light.
She glanced at it, rubbed her temples, and looked again. The cat was incredibly lifelike, with each hair clearly defined, its body shape, wide-open round eyes, and upturned tail all rendered with exquisite detail.
Xiao He, sitting in a chair holding a cat, is clearly a chubby girl with a bald head.
I don't know where he learned his drawing style from; apart from being a person, it has absolutely nothing to do with the real person.
Xiaohe ran over, stood on tiptoe to look, and asked, "Where am I?"
Guanghui was heartbroken. He ran over with his pen in hand and said, "Besides a cat, there's only one person. Can't you tell?"
Lin Xiushui and Xiaohe shook their heads in unison, "I can't tell."
“I always said that everyone has their own expertise, and that different professions are like different worlds. I’m just a cat painter. Cats and people don’t understand each other, except when I call them rebellious children,” Guanghui said, gazing into the distance with a sorrowful expression.
"Come on," Lin Xiushui clicked her tongue, then said earnestly, "There's a term for painting people called 'work and appearance,' and appearance is related to cats, so how can it not be related? It shows that you are a talent for this field. Paint more, and you will naturally get better."
Upon hearing this, Guanghui realized that what he said made sense, and humbly asked, "Then what should I do?"
"study."
Her painting skills were good, but her portraits were nothing special. Lin Xiushui had a good plan: Guanghui would make clothes for her at a low price and then include a portrait as a bonus, creating a unique selling point.
You're overthinking it.
At least when it comes to painting people in a way that makes them look vibrant and lifelike, there is still a long way to go.
Guanghui, wanting to go out and see the old master craftsmen who painted the picture, rushed downstairs and ran out the door in a few steps.
Lin Xiushui walked down slowly, leaning against the wall, her hands behind her back holding the roll of drawing paper. When she got downstairs, she lifted the curtain to show it to the tailor, who laughed so hard he almost bumped into the sewing box on the corner of the table.
"Don't be impatient. Although business isn't booming right now, we still make about ten or twenty garments a day, which is much better than most tailor shops," the tailor said, pausing his smile, smoothing his temples, opening a booklet and handing it to Lin Xiushui, his hand tracing the page. "Here, there are twelve people who came to make autumn clothes today."
"Let me see."
Lin Xiushui took it. Shuiji Clothing had just opened, and business was so-so. There were many people coming and going, but not many who wanted to have their clothes made. She picked up the catalog and glanced at it. Five or six of the twelve were still the women who had come to her for alterations before, repeat customers.
She was in a hurry. Even though the income wasn't much, she made sure everyone's clothes were ready to be picked up in seven days. Fearing it wouldn't be ready in time, she only collected half the deposit. But the fabric had to be paid for in advance. All the money Lin Xiushui earned in her tailor shop went into buying fabric. Each person needed two or three bolts of fabric to make a garment, so she had to buy a dozen or twenty bolts, which inevitably left her short of money.
She was no longer the woman who had a full purse and handfuls of loose silver before she bought the shop. Now she could only find a few scattered copper coins and was hoping that the tailor would distribute "disaster relief money".
Lin Xiushui put the booklet on the table and wrote down the fabric she wanted to buy. Liu Sanjie from next door came over. It was almost dusk, and seeing that there were only two people in the house, she hurried over and asked, "Little Lin's wife, Master Jin, is the dress ready? I'm waiting to wear it."
“We’ll have to wait until tomorrow,” Lin Xiushui put down her pen. “The top is finished, but the skirt pleats aren’t ironed yet. We’ll have to wait.”
Liu Sanjie paced back and forth in the shop, saying, "I'm just waiting to wear my new clothes."
“Then try it on,” said the tailor, taking out the upper garment and skirt hanging in the inner room.
The color of the dark pink was quite unique. Liu Sanjie touched the pink floral dress, put it on, and said, "I wore pink when I was six or seven years old, but I never wore it again when I was twenty-eight. Now I'm already twenty-eight."
“Pink doesn’t discriminate by age. You can wear it if you’re thirty-eight, forty-eight, fifty-eight, or sixty-eight. Hurry up and try it on,” the tailor’s words broke the silence.
Liu Sanjie exclaimed "Oh!" and ran upstairs to put on her clothes. She tried them on and then tugged at the skirt on her chest. Lin Xiushui adjusted the black and blue floral shawl on her shoulders, letting it hang down from her left shoulder and down to the bottom of her skirt, with the other end draped over her right elbow.
"Do I look alright like this?" Liu Sanjie raised her hand, then looked at her pink dress and couldn't take another step.
When she looked in the mirror, the face in the mirror looked extremely surprised, as if it wasn't her. She turned around, and the pink skirt fluttered.
She bent down to take another look, and the pink color didn't make her look haggard at all. She seemed to have returned to her younger days, and the shawl on her shoulders made her forget her uneven shoulders.
Liu Sanjie didn't want to take off her clothes. She pulled Lin Xiushui with her left hand and held the tailor's hand with her right, saying, "I will definitely introduce business to you two."
“I call all the people I know to come to you to have clothes made.”
The tailor, Jin, showed some interest. "How many people do you know?"
"Several hundred or a thousand people."
Lin Xiushui grasped her hand in return and chuckled, "Then we'll wait."
Liu Sanjie said boldly, "Just wait, I'll definitely get everyone to make new clothes."
“Who says new clothes are bad?” a child stepped across the threshold and said innocently, “I want to wear new clothes too.”
"My mother ordered a dress for me here that I can only wear in the fall," the little girl said, puzzled. "There's an osmanthus tree at home, and my mother said it would bloom in the fall. It opened its little flowers last night. Autumn is here, so why hasn't the dress arrived yet?"
The little girl's name was Jin Gui. Her mother sold raw lotus seeds, lotus roots, and fresh lotus leaves on this street. A couple of days ago, her mother brought her to order clothes. Jin Gui would run over and circle around the shop to see if her clothes were ready. If she heard that they weren't, she would droop her head, kick her skirt, and walk away step by step.
Unable to bear Jin Gui's longing gaze, Lin Xiushui quickly said, "The osmanthus flowers haven't fully bloomed yet. Wait until they bloom a little longer, and your new clothes will arrive along with them."
“Then I’ll go and urge the osmanthus to wake up tomorrow morning,” Jin Gui said.
The tailor said, "Well done. If it won't open, I'll fan it for you."
Osmanthus needs light, and so does the slapstick.
An old man and a young man were discussing how to make the osmanthus flowers bloom faster. Lin Xiushui quietly added that she should urge them to bloom faster.
Since the Weaving Association took on orders from over a hundred people, the tailor's workshop has become increasingly busy, with an overwhelming amount of work. In the past, they would make the same dress over and over again, but now no two dresses are the same.
But even as the price of silver kept rising, no one complained. Especially when they took on Lin Xiushui's jobs, the materials were selected and the samples were made. All that was left was to sew and mend. The work was easy, but they were always pressed for time.
“There’s nothing we can do,” Lin Xiushui said, squatting down beside the table with her hands clasped together. “It’s not easy for everyone to find clothes to wear.”
"Stop rushing me, stop rushing me!" an old tailor shouted. "My God, where did you get so much work from? I've done more work in the past month than I did in the previous month!"
Another group of women carrying pink cloth passed by the door and loudly echoed, "That's right! I used to carry cloth once a day, but now I carry cloth ten times a day."
Other clothing shops and tailors were already thinking about osmanthus-patterned clothes, putting more effort into them, determined to make skirts different from lotus flowers, which would become popular throughout the town.
However, the tailor did not rush to make new clothes. Instead, he followed the lotus pattern and planned to specialize in it.
This prompted many veteran tailors to come up with more ideas.
While others were in charge of drawing thread and mending, Lin Xiushui had relatively ample time in the tailor's workshop to think about the next garment design.
However, she's been in the spotlight lately, and everyone's been watching her closely. Instead of releasing any particularly novel clothes, she's been sticking to a more conventional style.
No one knows what she's up to. Only Lin Xiushui herself knows. When she's even poorer and has no money to spend, she'll probably be forced by money to come up with any kind of clothes she wants.
Right now, she's looking for a painter.
Guanghui is temporarily out of reach, but fortunately, she knows someone. At the Weaving Fair, she met a 42-year-old woman who is not actually a painter, but a dough figurine maker.
She sculpted incredibly lifelike figures, and her portraits were remarkably similar to human faces. Later, she taught herself to draw people, and she jokingly called herself a nameless painter from the streets.
When Lin Xiushui followed the road and arrived, Zhang Shunniang was no longer at her stall; she was washing clothes in the yard.
"You want me to be a painter? To paint people?" Zhang Shunniang wrung out the clothes in her hands, shook her head, lowered her eyelids to look at the clothes in her hands, and said calmly, "I can't paint. I can only scribble a few strokes. It's not something that can be presented to the public."
She waved her clothes, unmoved. Her family kept arguing with her about buying her drawing paper, telling her not to draw such things, that they were creepy to look at, and that drawing people on paper, and drawing them so realistically, was like bewitching souls.
If any of the neighbors on either side are frightened, they will all blame her.
Lin Xiushui reached out to help her wring out her clothes, saying to herself, "Even a bowl of cold rice with water is presentable, so what's so unpresentable about a portrait?"
“I have someone who can paint faces and clothes. He pays two strings of cash a month. He only paints in the morning and afternoon. He can paint at night so it won’t interfere with your work, my wife.”
Upon hearing this, Zhang Shunniang looked into the house and was somewhat tempted. This would earn her more than making dough figurines, but she hesitated. She couldn't leave her house, and she couldn't bring herself to refuse. So she could only twist her clothes again and again.
"My lady, think it over. If you've made up your mind, come to the row of shops east of Sangqiao Ferry tomorrow morning and ask me about Xia Shui Ji Quan Yi. It's okay if you don't come," Lin Xiushui said after helping her wring out the clothes, and then left.
After she left, Zhang Shunniang didn't rest. She thought about this while working at home, feeding the chickens millet, sweeping the floor, washing several large vats and sticking her head into them, cooking for the whole family and being so tired that her back couldn't straighten up, and even listening to the deafening snoring next to her at night.
She thought and thought, and didn't sleep a wink all night. She didn't even knead the dough she was supposed to knead. She went straight out the door, and instead of taking a boat, she just walked. She walked for a long time, and when she reached Sangqiao Ferry, the sky was just beginning to lighten. She found Shui Ji's clothes and sat quietly on the steps.
Lin Xiushui walked over, not surprised at all, and simply asked her, "Wife, have you eaten?"
“I’m eating,” Zhang Shunniang said, taking a pancake out of her pocket, taking a big bite, then taking off the bundle she was carrying and handing over a stack of rough paper.
It was a stack of portraits. Lin Xiushui looked through them one by one. The paint was not good paint, and the color faded quickly, but the ink was still clearly visible on the surface. The portraits were very detailed and lifelike, capturing the essence of each person's eyebrows and eyes.
Although the brushwork is not very good and sometimes appears rough, it is sufficient for Lin Xiushui.
Zhang Shunniang bit into the pancake hard, and after chewing it all, she seemed to have made up her mind and said, "I can draw."
"Then paint it for a day first, and I'll see if it's good. If it is, I'll paint it tomorrow," Lin Xiushui said, handing the painting back to her so that someone could try it out first.
Zhang Shunniang was indeed a skilled painter. Her greatest strength lay in her ability to draw a person's eyebrows and eyes in a very short time, making them look lifelike at first glance.
Lin Xiushui said, "This is a very commendable skill."
“Really?” Zhang Shunniang looked at her and wiped her paintbrush; she didn’t know.
The following day, Lin Xiushui, together with the tailor Jin, arranged most of the ordered clothes into sets according to each person's needs and hung them on the hangers.
Jin Gui was the first to arrive after the door opened. Her little face was flushed and her eyes were bright. She ran in and looked at the wall. She exclaimed and jumped up, "Is this my new dress?"
It was a yellow-green outfit, with a light yellow cross-collar top embroidered with clusters of osmanthus flowers on the collar, and a dark green pleated skirt, the color of leaves.
"It's yours, try it on," Lin Xiushui said, taking it down and handing it to her. It was worth it for her to have taken it out and hung it high up that morning.
Jin Gui didn't change, but ran out and after a while pulled her mother in, letting her mother watch her change. Seeing her put on the new clothes, she put on the clothes with a heart full of joy and trepidation.
She didn't dare to walk fast, only looking at her dress in the mirror, covering her mouth with her small hands, but a smile and joy still escaped from the corners of her mouth.
Lin Xiushui was tidying up the other clothes when she stopped and said, "If this is the first time you've had clothes made at our shop, you can get a self-portrait as a gift."
"What do you mean?" Jin Gui's mother asked, puzzled. "Do we still need money?"
"Of course not."
Lin Xiushui said with a smile, "This is a gift, so that the image of you wearing new clothes can be preserved in the painting forever."
She said the same thing to the people who came to try on clothes later.
There are mothers and daughters, sisters, children like Jin Gui, and elderly people.
They left their first portrait in the Shuiji Clothing Collection, marking the first time in their lives that they were recorded.
That was a unique life experience.
Of course, Shuiji Clothing gained considerable fame, which in turn led to a flood of job offers.
Continue read on readnovelmtl.com
