And with that, life suddenly got REALLY BUSY! We ordered fancy clothes, asked and got an audience with King Athal and Queen Raisse… And at the audience (well, it was more like a family style dinner in their personal apartments, because, well, Raisse and Athal know pretty much every student at the Guild School, especially the ones who stand out for one reason or another. Our fancy clothes weren’t even ready, so eager where they to see our sketchbooks!

Which meant we had a really nice evening of bragging and showing off, especially showing off because our sketchbooks mostly showed parts of the country the King and Queen hadn’t visited yet — between Nalenay and Tylenay. Whether it were Master Jeran’s landscapes and workplace drawings, my people at work or at leisure, or Cynla’s animals and details, they were all over it. They wanted to buy the sketchbooks for the Palace Library, but we refused, because we wanted Lesla to see them first, as we had promised. I bet they’ll end up there, though.

Nobody in all of Valdyas, and maybe all of the WORLD has ever done something like we just did, and I cannot wait to go and paint another long stretch of Valdyas, maybe next year.

We were promised we could use biggest of the big reception rooms in the palace for our exhibition — one that has wonderful light from windows at the two long sides of the room. There’s a dais at the end — it’s often used for larger functions, like when new laws need to be debated, or stuff like that. I don’t really know how that works, even though they tried to teach us about all of that at school. It’s still just beyond my imagination. But the room is perfect. There were already a bunch of paintings in there along the walls, that couldn’t be moved, most of them boring as — I’m not exactly sure, maybe they just were the most boring things I’ve ever seen. After all, pretty much everything in this world is wonderfully interesting and paintable, I don’t know how these painters have managed to make their subjects so boring.

And well, after that, we needed to work with the Palace carpenters to create boards-on-stilts to hang our paintings, with the weavers’ guild for cloth to hang on the boards as a backdrop for our paintings, with the smithy for a system to hang paintings that didn’t have a frame yet…

Then, at the Temple of Mizran, we had our own, private safe room where all our work was stored, and in the mornings we were busy selecting the best pieces for the exhibition. And we started writing notice boards to go with the paintings, like, explaining where it was made and by whom, I suddenly had an inspiration.

I thought we should team up with one of those new-fangled printing shops and make woodcuts of our paintings, add the descriptions we were just done writing, and sell those at the exhibition? The exhibition was free, of course, nobody should have to pay to get into the Royal Palace, but we could sell booklets… And if we’d let the printer sell reprints outside the exhibition, they might give us a discount, too!

Long story short, we found a good printer, and he agreed, and also agreed to sign a Temple of Mizran contract with penalty clauses giving us lots of money if we ever discovered he sold books printed from detoriated blocks, and then… I had a new challenge. I was going to have to turn our sweet, subtle, en energetic, colorful paintings into black and and white drawings simple enough that they could be cut into pear wood blocks, but still show what our paintings were depicting and what we were trying to show.

That was pretty exciting in itself! It was a bit like painting in glass, or in wool, but at the same time different, but it was still a matter of judging light, shadow and darkness, so all good!

And then, one day, the clothes were ready, the boards were ready, the paintings were hung, the books were ready.

The exhibition could open!