Perfect Day

 

The day began slowly on another near perfect summer morning. An absence of clouds made it a poor candidate for another sunrise painting, though he was still working on the one from 3 days ago. The sharp smell of the pigments was nearly lost in the slight breeze, enough lingered to identify them as high quality. His brush and canvas were similarly high end. He felt bad wasting such resources on a beginner such as himself, but no-one else in the area had thought to pick up the materials.

There were plenty of painters around, a lopsided balance between oil-based and watercolours, and there was an abundance of courses. Few, however made use of the nanopigments. They were an import from the higher technology areas and generally if you wanted those you were already there for the other amenities.

Not that there was a hard and fast set of rules about what could be where, but generally flashier devices were kept to areas where most people were already familiar with them. It mostly boiled down to what kind of lifestyle you were going to conform to. If you were in the low-tech areas that meant that the best way to get your input on things was to see you in person and spend at least a half hour on any particular problem or point. The technology areas tended to have a lot more micro-interactions that, while keeping people on task and on the same page, often interrupted the flow of people that worked well independently.

Similarly the music of each particular area was kept to suit the era of most of the inhabitants. He preferred the old classical music on the original instruments. Having it played back on a speaker that blended into the natural surroundings, as innocuous looking stone, was a convenience he couldn’t quite give up.

There was a monthly fair where ultra modern trinkets were paraded around and demonstrated to people from all points in history and wireless speakers were naturally one of the first things to be adopted. Radio was a natural followup once people got used to the idea of long distance communication.

Of course, the idea wasn’t to have everywhere being homogeneous, so things like televisions were rare outside of buildings where they weren’t absolutely needed. This again went back to lifestyle rather than any particular fear or distrust of technology.

People in the less developed areas tended to pick a single task and spend a great deal of time on it, while those from tech-rich sites bounced from job to job and seemed to lack a longer attention span. It was a full week before he had finished his painting, although it was quite a small canvas. One could more easily focus on details if one wasn’t interrupted nearly constantly with notifications, single word responses and the burden of someone else’s broadcast schedule.

He plugged the canvas into a small power battery and used the other end of the paintbrush to tweak the nanopigments. Setting a range of colours for each shade to cycle through, and how quickly, took another few hours. With more effort he could make the edges of the clouds seem translucent and animated, but he decided to leave the wind effects to small areas of the foreground.

It was another week before the ‘low-tech’ fair had a tour of their goods in the wider world and he put the paining in the evaluation building near the middle of the town square. He set up a medium pile of parchment and beside it several small cheap quill pens. There was a certain code for what kind of feedback one was looking for, and this particular combination meant he was throwing the doors wide open. While the notes from actual experts was welcome, he was more interesting in general feedback from young and old, novices and passersby just as much. The size of the parchment meant that he wanted a lot of feedback rather than just simple notes.

Unfortunately for him, the use of emojis was almost universal, but the presence of a quill meant that you at least had to draw something unique yourself if you were taking the easy way out. This usually meant having to reproduce an outline of the painting and place the emoji over the specific spots you liked rather than just the reaction by itself. There was further code for placing the reaction in a specific corner of the art, but that hadn’t quite become universal yet. Those who used it knowingly put a box around the reaction to make it understood that they were ‘in’ on the practice.

As expected, a lot of the reaction was about the range and cycling of colours, with people highlighting either their favourite part of the clouds or the simulated movement of the nearest parts of the grass. More than a few people had put question marks or exclamation points over these areas, they had obviously missed the presentation on the nanopigments, or hadn’t guessed at the full potential of them. He would have to have the next demonstration from high-tech areas do a better job of highlighting their use.

A few of the reactions were from the actual masters of painting from the area. Most of the questions he couldn’t answer immediately, but he dutifully made a list of them and set about contacting the manufacturers. A lot of the questions were about being able to match certain shades, with and without power and if they would stand up to certain mixing techniques.

The technology was still in it’s infancy and most of the early adopters were used to digital only artwork, meaning the pigments were applied more through airbrushes and other modern tools. They had mostly figured that older painters would pick up all the new tools, rather than just the colours.

He initially didn’t want to get into the middle of things, seeing the painting as a kind of one-off experiment, but he was uniquely suited to act as a kind of middleman to the various groups. It would likely mean that he would have to move a bit closer to the modern area of the region, but the Nano-Pigmentation group at least understood the desired lifestyle of the other groups. It seems that as a collective, they had similar ideals and instead they were the ones to move their R&D group to the Mideaval zoned area.