The Versatile Master Artist

”Why not give it a try now?”

Gu Weijing pondered for a moment.

He was filled with images of adorable cats and dogs, and it felt incomplete not to draw something and see the result.

Gu Weijing picked up a sheet of watercolor paper, attached it to the cabinet with a magnet, and casually grabbed a soft charcoal stick.

Even though he wasn’t lacking professional zoological knowledge at the moment,

when drawing cats and dogs,

it’s still best to find a model.

”A model?”

Old Wu’s arts and crafts shop probably kept a Chinese tabby cat for catching mice around the yard.

However, that cat was a bit fierce and not easy to approach.

Gu Weijing had been scratched by it before and had to get a vaccine.

Forget it!

Maybe find something online instead.

Gu Weijing opened YouTube and searched for ”cute cats” as the keyword. He simply chose a video titled ”All Things Have Spirit” uploaded by a YouTuber.

It was a cloud cat petting video with over five million views and attracted thousands of comments.

”With such popularity, let’s go with this one.”

Gu Weijing started the playback.

The phone screen showed a preschooler playing with a black and white short-haired cat.

The cat wasn’t a particularly rare breed.

But it was chubby with black and white spotted fur, resembling a little cow.

No kidding, it was really cute!

Gu Weijing was amused, sniffling a couple of times, then concentrated on closely watching the short-haired cat playing with its little owner.

”It’s really different now!”

He was surprised to find that he could not only imagine the bones and muscles hidden beneath the skin of the short-haired cat working in coordination with its every movement.

Gu Weijing could now clearly discern the subtle changes in the short cat’s emotions like excitement, anxiety, or slight impatience through its body language.

”Pet Mind Reading Skill, this name isn’t just an exaggerating gimmick.”

Similar to Bilibili,

the YouTube comments section was filled with various timestamps left by netizens to mark their favorite moments in the video.

Gu Weijing browsed the comments section, choosing a timestamp left by a commenter at 2:06 in the video.

His accompanying comment was ”Unbelievable! She’s just too cute!”

This comment section had 603 replies.

Replies came from all over the world, in all sorts of languages, some of which Gu Weijing couldn’t understand at all.

But that didn’t matter.

Flipping through a couple of pages, he understood that the essence of these 600 replies could be succinctly summed up as ”A Wei is dead.”

Gu Weijing locked the progress bar at these few seconds to watch repeatedly.

The video frame happened to capture the short-haired cat nudging a tiny catnip ball with its nose, happily rolling around on the dining cabinet before rolling down to the tiles below.

No wonder the viewers’ inner girlishness couldn’t handle it.

Indeed, extremely adorable!

Gu Weijing set the video to slow playback, letting the phone screen freeze at the moment the cat was flipping in mid-air.

He tilted his head, pinching the charcoal stick between his thumb and index finger.

Suspending his wrist, Gu Weijing attempted to draw the outline of the cat’s posture on the watercolor paper in that moment.

The cat’s entire body muscles and bones twisted like noodles in mid-air, resembling a highly elastic gluten.

The phone’s camera found it challenging to capture this high-speed descent posture.

Various afterimages blurred together, only barely providing a rough view.

But for the current Gu Weijing, this was already enough.

He had deep insight into the cat’s dynamic postures.

Gu Weijing knew that a simple roll-over landing, in the professional field of biology, could be broken down into five complete steps involving muscle and bone movement.

Body preparation, twisting action, throwing motion, center of gravity shift, and landing on the ground.

Using the charcoal stick on the absorbent surface of the paper, Gu Weijing pulled a surprisingly elastic twist curve.

This reflected the spinal state of the British short cat in the video frame on the phone screen.

The mid-air cat was situated between shifting its center of gravity and landing on the ground.

It propelled its body to roll sideways through the twisting of its spine and limbs, utilizing its body’s flexibility and coordination to control its balance.

”The neck muscles of a cat are highly developed, coordinating the head and body rotation during a roll. The rectus abdominis contracts into a ball. Short-haired cats have specialized spinal rotation muscles to twist their bodies, while the tail serves as an important balance aid...”

If a professional veterinarian heard his musings, they would certainly marvel at this young man’s astonishing understanding of feline anatomy.

In his mind, Gu Weijing deconstructed the short-tailed cat’s less than 0.1-second movement into countless muscle details.

He didn’t depict every strand of the cat’s muscle or fur texture detail; he had the knowledge, but drawing such precise detail just for practice seemed unnecessary.

The main focus was capturing the essence.

”Swish, swish, swish...”

He effortlessly sketched a few lines on the watercolor paper, capturing the relationship of the cat’s entire body posture on the paper with simple strokes.

The painting technique wasn’t complicated.

The vast amount of information from the Knowledge Card had already imbued these lines with a natural soul.

The simple black and white sketch composed of charcoal lines, created in less than a minute, appeared far more vivid than the colorful pencil illustrations he had painstakingly crafted before.

Elder Cao mentioned that the three elements of an excellent artwork are knowledge, skill, and emotion.

The drastic improvement in sketching skills, in conjunction with zoological knowledge, had induced a tremendous change in the two cat sketches before and after.