The Versatile Master Artist

This habit persisted for forty years in Balthus’s life.

He should be the artist with the deepest understanding of cats.

Unfortunately, Balthus didn’t have a system, he couldn’t cheat.

Gu Weijing was confident that Balthus’s forty years of observing and accumulating knowledge about cats still couldn’t compare to the effect of a Knowledge Card.

Those who draw cats are not as professional as zoologists who study them.

The Knowledge Card categorized pet expressions into various emotional expressions such as joy, anger, sorrow, happiness, hunting, defense, vigilance, courtship, etc. Each expression corresponded to physical states like pupils dilating to capture more visual information, minuscule muscle contractions in the follicles making the hair stand up, and so on.

The wealth of knowledge he obtained could practically allow him to be a professional psychologist for pets.

Gu Weijing took out his phone.

He clicked on the avatar on his Nutshell homepage.

Their family ran a bookstore and gallery, unlike wealthy great artists who could separate the family environment from their studio, have pets like cats and dogs, and have special caregivers.

Grandfather Gu Tongxiang believed that keeping a pet would be restless at home.

They would run around everywhere and shed fur everywhere. If a cat came into heat and scratched those unprotected paintings in the gallery, it would be maddening.

So it was forbidden to have pets at home.

To be fair, Gu Weijing himself quite liked small animals.

When he registered an anonymous artist account, he casually picked the name "Detective Cat", and the avatar was also a female cat with a monocle.

Gu Weijing’s understanding of cats was much higher than when he created the Detective Cat avatar.

At this moment, his mind held an encyclopedia of cats, including British Shorthairs, Orange Tabby Cats, Chinese Li Hua Cats, Ragdoll Cats, Cats sleeping, yawning, chasing butterflies, catching fleas.

He looked at his Nutshell avatar and immediately realized that the cat he had casually drawn at the time was a...

Half-paralyzed, oddly bizarre, mottled dull cat.

Gu Weijing shrank his neck.

He got goosebumps all over from looking at it!

The fur color was wrong; it didn’t have the natural fur coloring and stripes that grew into how it looked in his colored pencil sketch was still a minor issue.

The key was that the eye proportions were wrong, with the distance between the eyes and the nose being too wide.

The zygomatic bone was too long, the mandible too narrow, and the cat’s pupils should look like a gradient dyed olive in bright sunlight; the pupil of the cat he drew was odd, and the overall expression on its face was strange.

This painting was not of a real cat but merely a creation pieced together based on Gu Weijing’s stereotypical impressions of small animals at that time.

If it were a human as the subject,

This painting would be one with a crooked mouth, slanted eyes, no neck, a receding chin, a prominent forehead, a nose quite far from the upper lip, half the face stiff, and the other half showing a bizarre smile, somewhat resembling a Cthulhu Elder God, making one feel deeply uncomfortable.

Many cartoon animal illustrations or serious artworks with incorrect body proportions and muscle lines can also bring negative emotions to the audience.

Messily drawn portraits seem eerie and make the audience feel like losing San points.

Messily drawn animal portraits don’t often receive such strong reactions, simply because ordinary people are far less familiar with animals than they are with humans.

But if you’re familiar enough with animals, you can also sense the uncanny valley effect in off-looking animal drawings.

Even if you don’t find it disgusting.

A drawing of an animal like this before you can only simply convey the abstract concept of "this thing is a cat."

No matter how you look at it, the audience cannot derive that unique fluffy, soft little spirit feeling that naturally brings joy to your heart.

It lacks the "aura" of real nature.

Gu Weijing couldn’t take it after looking at it for a while. He was speechless; it was just drawing a cat, and he hadn’t thought there was anything wrong before, but now he feels his avatar is really too ugly.

He secretly resolved to change to a new avatar in a few days.