fandomhigh | Art, Thursday, Period Three

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Art, Thursday, Period Three

Okay, so Peridot needed to be gently shooed away from making more statuary horrors, Rufus needed to be encouraged to experiment and let go, Gratuity and Eric needed to be encouraged in general, and Summer needed to understand that no professional con artist--hell, no one who listened to the radio--was buying her 'I am free like a horse frollicking in a meadow' nonsense.

Though he appreciated the attempt, so good on her anyway.

"A'ight class, what's up?" he greeted as they came into the art room. No Danger Shop this week; all the materials they needed were right here. It had taken a bit of time to get the walls covered with paper, but it wasn't like anyone else was going to be using the art room. "So, last week, you worked in the familiar, whether it was a piece you'd designed a hundred times or just somethin' that you're already familiar with. But art is about pushin' limits an' challengin' the status quo. Today, you're thinkin' big an' bright an' colorful."

He pointed to the walls which were all covered by large swathes of thick, white paper. "First of call, there's your canvas. Each of y'all pick a section of wall, at least as wide as your wingspan an' as tall as you are--though you can go bigger if you want." Because otherwise Peridot would have a fairly limited amount of wall to work on. "There are stools an' chairs' and step-ladders in case you wanna get higher. An' this is your medium." He pulled out an entire box of...shaving cream? And food coloring. And muffin tins.

Okay then.

"So, first off, you're gonna make your own color palette," Hardison instructed, adding a bit of the shaving cream to a cup in the muffin tin and then a drop of yellow food coloring. He mixed it and the resulting cream was a pale, lemony shade. "Y'all got red, blue, yellow, an' black food coloring. With those, you should be able to experiment an' make as many different shades as you want. The ratio of food colorin' to shavin' cream changes the value an' vibrancy of the shade. You want dark, bold colors, use lots of food colorin' an' less cream. Soft pastels, more cream, less colorin'. Mess around until you got the colors an' values you want, then start paintin'." He nodded at the walls. "Figure out what you wanna paint, but make it somethin' you're not used to. Try somethin' new, somethin' experimental. I don't wanna see nothin' that looks like what you presented me last week. An' try to fill up the whole canvas if you can."

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In primary colors.

Summer Smith

Peridot

Gratuity Tucci

Eric Bittle

So you're painting on the walls with shaving cream. Have fun with that.

All this shaving cream was just making Summer think about how she was getting a little stubbly and should probably take care of her legs before it started veering into winter coat territory.

And also wondering who the hell was going to get stuck with cleaning this up...

Peridot... didn't get it.

But she was going to give it a try anyway. That was why she was here, after all!

Tip smirked faintly; this sounded like something J.Lo would come up with. She pulled her hair up in as tight a bun as she could manage and made a mental note to start bringing a scarf to this class in the future. She really wasn't looking to have to wash art class out of her hair every week.

Are you brights? Pastels? Did you wanna add glitter for gem tones? (Of course there was glitter, this was Fandom.) Going simple with just primary colors or giving yourself a wide range of shades to choose from?

Summer still wasn't sure what she was going to try to 'paint,' so she was mixing a good variety as best she could so that her options were open.

And glittery.

Duh.

Peridot mixed... greens, mostly. And yellows. And some blues. Which both seemed to go pretty well with the greens.

Yes, she was sticking with what she knew, here. What of it?

Tip knew just enough about color theory to be aware of complimentary colors. She'd just used orange last week, so blue-and-orange were out, and red-and-green were Christmas. So . . . no.

Purple and yellow it was. Mostly purple, in a wide variety of tints and shades, with a nice range of neutral grays to go with it, and a couple bright-ass yellows for spice.

Edited (Not reading all the instructions before starting. . . .) 2018-01-11 16:37 (UTC)

Eric had a bunch of bright colors mixed with glitter, and then something that was... burgundy-ish? Kinda? And a pale pink. Once he was reasonably satisfied with his selection, he moved on to painting.

Something big and not something from last week. If you want to paint a still life, a landscape, a self-portrait, that's up to you, just let it be something different from what you have experience with painting in the past.

Okay, so she had a bunch of shaving cream paint and a big old section of wall to fill with it, and...absolutely no ideas.

This was so much harder than art class with Deadpool. Hardison actually seemed to care. And like he'd come to class every week, too.

"Hm." She narrowed her eyes, considered the space, and then finally dipped in a brush, and began to paint pretty landscape, but the real focus of it was the center, with its screaming sun.

Her brief experience on that planet really seemed to reflect how she felt trying to think of something to paint. But the shaving cream gave the landscape a cool dreamy feel, she thought.

Hardison was the living embodiment of a goddamn Care Bear. Caring was what he did. In the Planeteers of Leverage, Hardison was heart, with a laptop in place of a monkey.

"Well, this is damn disturbin'," Hardison said genially. "Seems a lot more honest than a pretty horse prancin' through the fields."

Summer gave him a withering look. Pretty horses prancing through fields were majestic as hell, and if he couldn't get that, then it was his own damn fault.

"It represents how I feel trying to think of something to paint," she said, which, true, was pretty honest. "It's a real place, too. My family almost had to live there, until sunrise came and this guy showed up and we realized the days there were, like, a billion hours long, so we left and had to live on a tiny planet instead."

They were majestic. Hardison just didn't think Summer was the type to feel one with a prancing pony.

"Yeah, I'd have to relocate after a few minutes of that myself," Hardison agreed. "So what? Stayin' on Earth was for chumps or somethin'?"

"No," said Summer, dabbing a little more glitter green onto a tree, "we were on the run from the Galactic Federation because they failed to capture my grampa in their bogus wedding massacre sting. We couldn't go back to Earth because then theyd, you know, kill us all if we did."

Edited 2018-01-12 04:06 (UTC)

"...So, all those words individually made sense," Hardison noted. "But the way you just strung 'em all together made about no sense at all."

"Really?" Summer quirked an eyebrow. "Never had a whole galactic government try t kill your grampa, huh? And I even gave you the abridged, simple version."

"Couldn't tell you," Hardison said with a casual shrug. "Woulda needed to know my folks to have heard any stories about my grandpa."

"Oh," Summer wondered if next time, she should paint a foot in her mouth, but at the same time, how could she have known? "That sucks...I'm sorry. But, I mean, hey, bright side? No parents might be on the same level as having shitty parents. You've probably never had one of your dad's girlfriends try to kill you before, right?"

Summer sure knew how to make a great second impression.

Peridot was painting in the abstract today, with a big blue background as far as she could reach in all directions, and then yellow diamond shapes slapped up here and there.

And then she was rolling herself in the green paint and throwing herself at the wall, face first.

"PERFECT!"

So, a blue background, some yellow diamonds, and a big green Peridot-shaped splatter, arms and legs splayed out. Which she was then throwing a handful of glitter at for good measure.

Hardison rushed over. "Yo, you okay?" he asked.

Oh, Hardison. Peridots were made of sturdy stuff! This particular one was turning around with a big grin on her face, hands on her hips, covered head to toe in green shaving foam.

"I'm just fine! And look!" She waved a frothy arm toward the wall. "My masterpiece is complete! It might be a little more fleeting than the ancient mosaics of the Diamonds still gracing the ruins of the moon, but I believe it's every bit as dignified."

Well. It was something, anyway.

That sure was...a word. Maybe not the word he'd use to describe it, but this wasn't his work, was it?

"I'm guessin' the diamonds are important, then?"

"Only the most important Gems in the history of... well... Gems," Perdiot agreed, nodding. "They're the biggest, rarest, most powerful of all of us."

She paused. A blob of shaving cream fell off the end of her nose.

"And they could stand to use that power more efficiently, the clods."

"So, you seem a little indecisive," Hardison said. "Resentful an' respectful at the same time. Why they got a place in your paintin'?"

Peridot actually fidgeted a little at that.

"Because serving the Diamonds has been my entire life, until coming to Earth," Peridot explained. "They'll always be there, in some way. Yellow Diamond had them make me what I am. But," she gestured to the wall, "I've been trying something new, since coming to this planet. I've been trying to put Peridot in front of all of that. The Diamonds made me, but they're behind me."

After a bit of consideration, she started painting a wintery forest kind of landscape, using darker purple for the sky, lighter purple and white for snow covered ground, and black and gray for skeletal trees. The yellow she tried to use to make a sharply angled setting sun, but then immediately ran into trouble with it mixing with her purples and turning brown. She just kept adding more brighter yellow on top to try to compensate, but the shaving cream wasn't really drying and now she just had a yellow-brown mess. . . .

Maybe she could turn it into a hut or something? In the woods? Or an angry mud-monster? Dammit, she'd liked her purple-and-gray trees!

"That's easy enough to fix," Hardison said. "If you don't want that blob there."

Look, it was kinda obvious what didn't fit with the rest of the canvas.

"Though it's definitely a point of focus, if that's what you were goin' for."

"Yeah, no, it's terrible," Tip said. "You can say it's terrible. I can take it."

So... Eric's idea had been a self-portrait type thing, kind of, only-

As much as he might describe his own skin tone as "lily-white", it really wasn't when compared to something like shaving cream. Hence the vaguely pink compromise he'd managed to come up with.

Anyway! The proportions were a bit off, but when he was finished Eric had managed to paint two figures- one clad in glittery bright colors in the midst of a standing spin, and the other in bulky burgundy and white, holding a hockey stick.

Hardison came over and studied the picture. "I'm likin' the colors," he said. "Tell me about this, wouldja?"

"It's me," Eric said, with a small smile. "Well, this one is me before Fandom," he clarified, pointing to the sparkly figure skater. "And this'll be me in the fall," he pointed to the hockey player.

"Oh?" Hardison asked, nodding. "That's cool. What brought about this switch?"

"Mostly that they don't give out too many scholarships for figure skatin'," Eric said with a shrug.

In case there's something you need.

*falls over*

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Art, Thursday, Period Three

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