ext_158887 (![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png)
seta-suzume.livejournal.com) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
31_days2012-12-18 01:42 pm
seta-suzume.livejournal.com) wrote in 31_days2012-12-18 01:42 pm
[Dec. 18] [Fullmetal Alchemist] Daniel the Painter
Title: Daniel the Painter
Day/Theme: Dec. 18, 2012 "and what if I put off my inheritance?"
Series: Fullmetal Alchemist
Character/Pairing: OCs (Kimblee's family)
Rating: PG
Author's comment: I have a lot of ideas about the life Daniel, the focus of this story, might go on to lead, but I'm not definitively set on any of them as "this is what happened"... (If you're curious about him you can read some of the more developed ideas here)
With the right mix of materials at hand, Daniel could make the paint any color he wanted. He remembered the way he'd done this when he was a little boy, squeezing the pre-made stuff out of tubes, adding color and water and stirring and stirring with his brush until he had achieved the hue he desired. "Don't waste paint," his grandfather had said, ever the frugal one. "He's learning, dear," Grandmom had answered, softening his stern assertions with her worn, heavy smile.
Grandmom had liked to watch him paint the most out of all the things he did back then. It was akin to drawing, but not as suspect. His father had liked to draw as a boy, but that led to things that brought her sorrow. What she had taken for strangely orderly youthful doodlings had turned out to be rudimentary alchemic arrays. He worked with a ruler not because he hoped someday to make buildings, but because he wanted the power to bring them down with nothing but a formula and his own two hands.
His painting was loose and sloppy, hardly the deadly precision that could be turned back to kill a man or bring a people the state had labeled an enemy to their knees. Maybe he could have tried to paint a bit more like his drafting, but there was something pleasurable about doing things this way instead. Simple, easy, putting aside rules for something full of feeling. There was an entire school of painting like this, he was told, focused on colors and impressions, but he had no acquaintance with it. Whatever art Daniel made, he made on his own, with little outside influence.
His father could've been an artist if he had liked. The drawings he had left behind were good in Daniel's opinion, better than the things he sketched himself. They were stylized and wound with curlicues and color styled and swirled in exotic ways. But something had driven him to alchemy above all else. An alchemist in his own right, Daniel wondered if he knew the reason, if it had to do with that drive not just to see or imagine, but to know. Art could be about many things, but it was rarely, in his experience, about knowing.
He sat in the attic of his grandparents' home and looked at his late father's sketchbooks and wished that his father had just been an artist. And maybe in that case, he would not have been an alchemist first, or at all. Maybe he too would have stuck to the things that were simple and small and have been an artist.
Maybe his father would have lived then, inside the bounds of the law, rebelling with a brush or a piece of a charcoal instead of an open pair of deadly hands.
It was times like this that Daniel reminded himself that from all the things he had heard it was hardly assured that he would have liked his father. …But still, a father was a father (but an artist was not an artist- explosions were only one odd person's idea of art).
When he was small, he painted Grandmom and the swing in the backyard all under the blossoming orange trees or the fancy decorated cookies they liked to bake together for tea. Now he painted landscapes mostly, the things that he had seen while traveling the country. Amestris contained many sorts of views within its shrinking borders and for someone who had never set out with any particular intention to travel, Daniel had seen quite a lot- the fields and sheep in the east, the snowy mountains in the north, the dusky dry land of Ishval.
He took up his brush and recreated these things from the memories he had of all the sights he'd seen with more of an eye for the way he had felt about the place than for accuracy.
He set up his easel on the back patio of his grandparents' home and his grandmother came out, just as she done in his childhood, and watched him. Her joints ached and she had to sit more now. She was an old woman, alone but for Daniel, and pushing ninety. "It's like magic," she said as she watched him mix his paint, sketching the array that would change the plain white paint he bought at the local general shop into scarlet or emerald or aqua.
"It's just alchemy, Grandmom," he would laugh, thinking of all the complex things he had done with that art to which this tiny time-saving trick would pale in comparison, "It's only chemistry."
But even if alchemy made the colors, it was Daniel who made the art.
Day/Theme: Dec. 18, 2012 "and what if I put off my inheritance?"
Series: Fullmetal Alchemist
Character/Pairing: OCs (Kimblee's family)
Rating: PG
Author's comment: I have a lot of ideas about the life Daniel, the focus of this story, might go on to lead, but I'm not definitively set on any of them as "this is what happened"... (If you're curious about him you can read some of the more developed ideas here)
With the right mix of materials at hand, Daniel could make the paint any color he wanted. He remembered the way he'd done this when he was a little boy, squeezing the pre-made stuff out of tubes, adding color and water and stirring and stirring with his brush until he had achieved the hue he desired. "Don't waste paint," his grandfather had said, ever the frugal one. "He's learning, dear," Grandmom had answered, softening his stern assertions with her worn, heavy smile.
Grandmom had liked to watch him paint the most out of all the things he did back then. It was akin to drawing, but not as suspect. His father had liked to draw as a boy, but that led to things that brought her sorrow. What she had taken for strangely orderly youthful doodlings had turned out to be rudimentary alchemic arrays. He worked with a ruler not because he hoped someday to make buildings, but because he wanted the power to bring them down with nothing but a formula and his own two hands.
His painting was loose and sloppy, hardly the deadly precision that could be turned back to kill a man or bring a people the state had labeled an enemy to their knees. Maybe he could have tried to paint a bit more like his drafting, but there was something pleasurable about doing things this way instead. Simple, easy, putting aside rules for something full of feeling. There was an entire school of painting like this, he was told, focused on colors and impressions, but he had no acquaintance with it. Whatever art Daniel made, he made on his own, with little outside influence.
His father could've been an artist if he had liked. The drawings he had left behind were good in Daniel's opinion, better than the things he sketched himself. They were stylized and wound with curlicues and color styled and swirled in exotic ways. But something had driven him to alchemy above all else. An alchemist in his own right, Daniel wondered if he knew the reason, if it had to do with that drive not just to see or imagine, but to know. Art could be about many things, but it was rarely, in his experience, about knowing.
He sat in the attic of his grandparents' home and looked at his late father's sketchbooks and wished that his father had just been an artist. And maybe in that case, he would not have been an alchemist first, or at all. Maybe he too would have stuck to the things that were simple and small and have been an artist.
Maybe his father would have lived then, inside the bounds of the law, rebelling with a brush or a piece of a charcoal instead of an open pair of deadly hands.
It was times like this that Daniel reminded himself that from all the things he had heard it was hardly assured that he would have liked his father. …But still, a father was a father (but an artist was not an artist- explosions were only one odd person's idea of art).
When he was small, he painted Grandmom and the swing in the backyard all under the blossoming orange trees or the fancy decorated cookies they liked to bake together for tea. Now he painted landscapes mostly, the things that he had seen while traveling the country. Amestris contained many sorts of views within its shrinking borders and for someone who had never set out with any particular intention to travel, Daniel had seen quite a lot- the fields and sheep in the east, the snowy mountains in the north, the dusky dry land of Ishval.
He took up his brush and recreated these things from the memories he had of all the sights he'd seen with more of an eye for the way he had felt about the place than for accuracy.
He set up his easel on the back patio of his grandparents' home and his grandmother came out, just as she done in his childhood, and watched him. Her joints ached and she had to sit more now. She was an old woman, alone but for Daniel, and pushing ninety. "It's like magic," she said as she watched him mix his paint, sketching the array that would change the plain white paint he bought at the local general shop into scarlet or emerald or aqua.
"It's just alchemy, Grandmom," he would laugh, thinking of all the complex things he had done with that art to which this tiny time-saving trick would pale in comparison, "It's only chemistry."
But even if alchemy made the colors, it was Daniel who made the art.