Intermediates: How artistic are you? on Care of Magical Creatures

Professor Taransay

May 30, 2017 12:58 PM

Intermediates: How artistic are you? by Professor Taransay

After a year and a half teaching at Sonora, Rory really felt like he was getting to know his students well. He definitely considered this a good thing. For him, one of the best parts of teaching was to inspire the students, and help them to realise what an interesting subject magizoology was. Who knew, one of them might even become an expert in the field!

“Hello, all,” he greeted the class with a smile as a they entered, waiting until they had all sat down and were ready before he started the lesson.

“Today I’ve brought a friend of mine to meet you,” he announced, gesturing to the bird sitting on a perch on his desk. “This is Janet. Can anyone tell me what species she is?” He picked on the first raised hand he saw, and gave house points for the correct answer.

Janet was, in fact, an Augurey. She had been part of the Taransay family for a few years, and was so attached to Rory in particular that she had been depressed since his visits home had been less frequent of late. She’d perked up a lot during the holidays, when he’d been back to the family island, and Rory had decided to bring her back to America with him. The controlled climate of Sonora luckily meant that she could cope in Arizona.

“One part of caring for magical creatures is collecting information about them,” he continued. “This uses many skills – observation, careful documentation, and even drawing.” He grinned, guessing that not every student would find their task especially easy. “Today I’d like you to draw Janet. I’m not giving you any more instruction than this, but remember that the drawing is meant to serve a purpose.” The ideal drawing would be precise, to scale, and labelled, but Rory preferred to let his students work out what information would be most useful. If they had to work something out for themselves, they would be more likely to remember it. He had, however, made copies of a drawing he’d done, which he would hand out at the end of the lesson.

“Janet’s quite used to humans, so do come up if you want a closer look. However, Augureys are generally shy, so I expect you to remember how to act around all creatures. Be gentle, quiet, and don’t make sudden movements.” Hopefully his intermediate students would be aware of this, but Rory would always rather remind them than risk stressing an animal.

“I’ve got coloured pencils at the front, if you want them, and you can talk amongst yourselves as you work.”

OOC: Normal class rules apply and, please, let’s not have an entire class of Monets! Information on Augureys can be found here: http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Augurey

Subthreads:

I'm feeling more grumpy, honestly. by Joe Umland, Teppenpaw with Ben Pierce, Pecari

Depends what kind of art (tag Nevaeh) by Raine Collindale, Teppenpaw with Nevaeh Reed [Aladren]

9 Professor Taransay Intermediates: How artistic are you? 33 Professor Taransay 1 5

Joe Umland, Teppenpaw

May 31, 2017 6:37 PM

I'm feeling more grumpy, honestly. by Joe Umland, Teppenpaw

Birds could be physically pretty, Joe supposed – some of them, anyway – but they were not interesting. Not really, anyway. It was, he thought, one thing to marvel at how they could build their nests with their feet and beaks and whatnot, Mom had walked with him and John and Julian around parks and pointed this out to them when they were very small and so Joe had to acknowledge that point, but it was quite another to actively find them interesting. They spent their lives pecking at seeds. There was nothing of inherent interest in this.

Despite the firmness with which Joe held this opinion, though, birds were nevertheless something he knew a fair bit about. This was a natural and inevitable consequence of having shared a room with John for most of his life. His brother had a marked fondness for corvids, but really, John seemed to find the common chicken as interesting as the magical phoenix, and if Joe recalled correctly had spent some time convinced there was a biological relationship between the two. Their room had always had books about birds, pictures of birds, feathers from birds, or at least had for as long as Joe could remember. Joe was pretty sure it was impossible to avoid absorbing some facts about the creatures after all that time. Everyone in his family knew what corvids were, for instance, and what a passerine was, and even the two others who’d also had the experience of rooming with John had not done so in quite some time. The others had just absorbed it from living in the same house as him.

Because of this background, Joe knew the answer to the professor’s question. Because of recent events, he chose not to say so and let someone else identify the augurey. No doubt Professor Taransay knew of his brother’s mania and therefore probably at least strongly suspected (besides just because of Joe being a good student in general) that Joe knew what the bird was, so impressing the professor wasn’t a factor, and he was annoyed today not so much with John himself as with birds for reminding him of his brother. Tomorrow, probably, it would be something different. In theory, one day, they would all feel substantially better, but Joe was really starting to doubt that. Even when he started a day off on the right foot, he came to class and the lesson was birds.

He knew it wasn’t really Taransay he was irritated with as the professor gave them his vague instructions, but he still frowned when the professor grinned anyway. He liked to know why he was doing things, plus he liked things he could actually do. Drawing was…not so much one of those things. He appreciated art, but there was a big difference between liking it and liking to make it. He had done okay last year in the Ethiopia booth, but he’d had a long, long time to work and re-work on that. Drawing something accurate enough to use for…whatever…in a few minutes sounded a lot harder, and in his current mood, didn’t suit at all.

Nevertheless, he took out his pen and parchment and found a comfortable seat not too far from the augurey where he could see it from two angles. He might move later to make sure he got all sides. He smiled at the person who was beside him. “I just love vague directions, don’t you? They make my day.”

16 Joe Umland, Teppenpaw I'm feeling more grumpy, honestly. 329 Joe Umland, Teppenpaw 0 5

Ben Pierce, Pecari

June 01, 2017 9:07 PM

That makes me, um, Happy? by Ben Pierce, Pecari

The new semester opened promisingly. Okay, yes, he was basically doing Kyte's homework for him now, but it wasn't really all that much of a change from how it had been going before, and now he was getting to watch real-actual circus practices which was somehow way cooler than the times Kyte had tried to teach Ben circus tricks - way way more advanced, and he didn't need to keep stopping what he was doing to tell Ben how to do the relatively simple trick he was trying. And getting to watch the practices revived the Ben's respect for his friend that Kyte's new smoking habit had lost.

Plus Kyte's new Jellyhand Jenga game was really awesome, so they'd been playing that some, too. Ben was almost ready to reinstate Kyte as Best Friend, except that, well, Tess was a lot prettier to look at. This could probably all be solved quite easily by actually Asking Tess Out, which would settle her in the even nicer role of Girl Friend and open Best Friend back up for Kyte, but that would involve Asking Tess Out, and Ben was finding that to be a very intimidating prospect. What if she didn't want to date him? Would asking mess up the Best Friend thing too? It was just too risky right now.

Anyway, even though The Reading Homework To Kyte Even Though He Is Totally Not Listening Project was only a few days into practice, Ben was already seeing improvements in his own retention rates on the readings. Whereas before he'd skimmed through as fast as possible to find the answers for the homework questions, now he was actually reading each assignment, and not just reading it, but reading it aloud so he heard it, too. And the material could then rattle around in his brain and it seemed to actually be sticking now, so when Professor Tarnasay asked what kind of creature he had, Ben had a better answer than 'It's a bird.' Actually knowing the answer was still new to him, though, so he opted not to volunteer it in case he was wrong, but it turned out to be an Augurey like he'd thought it was. Cool.

After the professor explained the assignment, Ben took out some parchment and a muggle pencil with an eraser on it (drawing in ink was just dumb as far as he was concerned) and set to sketching. He was by no means any good at drawing, but if the choices were to draw a bird or write an essay about a bird, he was totally not going to complain about the former.

He looked up in surprise as his neighbor began talking and Ben grinned at him, cheerfully, "It's awesome. I mean, if they're not too specific, they can't get too mad if you don't do exactly what they had in mind, right?" He added a few more lines to his drawing that were supposed to represent the Augurey's beak, but they looked more like a primer on how to draw a triangle than it resembled the bird's actual beak, so he put in an arrow to the area in question and added a label that read "If I could draw, this would be the beak, which doesn't look like this at all. It's pointy, but " he frowned at the bird, and chewed on his pencil a moment before finishing his note, "kind of more downturned at the end, like a hawk's, but less."

Peeking over at Joe's sketch, Ben asked, "You any better at drawing?"

1 Ben Pierce, Pecari That makes me, um, Happy? 339 Ben Pierce, Pecari 0 5

Raine Collindale, Teppenpaw

June 03, 2017 1:31 AM

Depends what kind of art (tag Nevaeh) by Raine Collindale, Teppenpaw

Raine stifled a yawn as she took her seat in Care of Magical Creatures. This term was going to be brutal. She had always tried to stay fit and healthy, to keep pushing herself to develop the skills she’d need for her family’s circus, but she had to admit it had slipped over the last couple of years. Without her family around, without being the default way of life, with it having to compete with all her school work, she definitely hadn’t been doing as much as she should’ve, and now she needed to catch up. That meant cardio workouts and flexibility training, on top of practising the moves for real with her hoop. Plus nagging Kyte, plus homework. She had got up at 5.30am in order to fit in an hour of pilates and an hour of studying before the day began for real. A nap at lunch time was sounding awfully tempting already, especially as she didn’t yet have any pressing assignments, although she was sure she’d regret it later when the work reached overload point. It was fine so long as the teachers just set reading. She’d truthfully never bothered to do more than fifty percent of that anyway, and Ben was currently joining their training sessions to read at them, though she barely took anything in from it. It was once they started having to put all those pieces together to make an essay or something that she already knew she’d have difficulty. But, in spite of being able to see the disaster on the horizon, it was so easy to put off doing anything but the bare minimum that she needed to keep herself out of detention and free to practise.

She stared, glassy eyed, as Professor Taransay asked them what kind of animal it was. It was a bird. She snapped to attention though when someone mentioned it was an augurey. Whilst mainstream science may have proven that augureys were nothing to do with death, Raine’s family was deeply superstitious, and she had been raised to believe that their cries were death omens. She really hoped the bird stayed quiet. How could Professor Taransay bring something like that into a school? The hairs on her arms were standing on end just thinking about it.

The combination of tired and panicked wasn’t the best for processing cryptic half-instructions, something Raine wasn’t very good at at the best of times anyway. She really wished teachers would just spell out what they wanted them to do. Of course, half the time she’d be unable to do it very well, but at least she’d know. She decided that having a friend to help her would be an advantage, because at least she wasn’t as embarrassed to admit to them that she hadn’t got a good grip on the material, and Nevaeh was probably the smartest of their group. She wondered what her friend was going to do for the main class assignment anyway… She guessed that Nevaeh was kind of used to taking instructions in her own way - when people said to read, write, or examine, Nevaeh had her own way to do that. Raine had seen the embossed and raised pictures in Nevaeh’s textbooks, but she didn’t know whether the other girl could produce them. She guessed it was a separate kind of skill, one that maybe depended on the artisticness of the individual, unlike learning to read and write which was a bit more cut and dry - you could just memorise letters, but you couldn’t memorise artistic ability.

“Hey,” she asked her friend, “You wanna work together?” She’d been too preoccupied to notice that partners hadn’t actually been mentioned, and as it was the usual way of working at Sonora, her mind had just defaulted to making it a pairs project. “I think I need some help to figure out what he means about purposes. Maybe I can contribute some artistic skills in return?” she offered uncertainly, partly because she didn’t want to imply Nevaeh couldn’t do something, in case she took that the wrong way, but also because Raine tended to not really value the skills she could offer when it came to anything scholastic. She was actually a halfway decent drawer though - it was a nice thing to do, when she needed to relax and recharge, although she tended to prefer flowers and trees to people and animals, as they were simpler and stayed still. “I can probably do an ok job in pencil, but I’ve looked into embossing and raising charms a bit,” she admitted. She had sort of been meaning to save that as a surprise for once she got good enough at it to use on Nevaeh’s Christmas cards, which she currently relied on different textured materials and cut outs to achieve, but now seemed a relevant time to bring it up. And, maybe if Nevaeh was experienced with them, she could help Raine know where she was going wrong. Raine's family philosophy on studying had always been to learn on the fly, finding the spells that were useful to them, and so - whilst she normally lagged behind in class - she had occasional, unexpected seams of talent, where a spell had seemed relevant and important enough for her to go and find out more. “So, maybe we can try some of those too?”

OOC - notes of Nevaeh’s textbooks checked with her author. The bird picture in this article is mostly what I’m referencing.

13 Raine Collindale, Teppenpaw Depends what kind of art (tag Nevaeh) 327 Raine Collindale, Teppenpaw 0 5

Joe Umland

June 07, 2017 10:44 AM

I'll take that over Sneezy. by Joe Umland

Joe thought about Ben Pierce’s way of looking at things. “Hm, good point,” said Joe. “It might come back to bite us later – “ Joe had found that bit where Taransay deliberately pointed out his own failure to give specific instructions a bit…ominous, somehow – “but you’re not wrong.”

His mother would be extremely displeased with this line of reasoning. He ignored this.

He drew a long oval which was supposed to be the Augurey’s body. He then began drawing smaller ovals over its chest, hoping this would suffice for drawing feathers. Then he realized he was going to find it difficult to differentiate the wings, so he tried to draw a double-thickness line to mark them off. A couple of the feathers on the wing edges looked darker, so he supposed he could shade those in more heavily – but then how to differentiate them from the lines showing they were even there? Maybe he could earn a few extra credit points and make life easier on himself by charming the paper to show the colors, or at least near approximations of them.

“I doubt it,” he said when Ben asked if he was any better at drawing. He added a great big triangle to the back of the oval for the tail. “I was just thinking about trying to charm in some colors so I can tell where the wings are. Colored pencils weren’t on the supply list I got back in July.” He didn’t know if Ben would recognize this reference or not. He felt reasonably sure that a guess that American public schools also gave students lists of stuff to buy for themselves would constitute an educated guess, but a good chunk of his classmates might not even be familiar with the idea of public primary education. Joe himself only knew of it by reputation and his private tutor growing up had been his mother. “I’m really regretting not taking that drawing program thing my mom wanted me to take before I came to school right now.”

16 Joe Umland I'll take that over Sneezy. 329 Joe Umland 0 5

Nevaeh Reed [Aladren]

June 15, 2017 7:10 PM

Bird art, from what I can tell. by Nevaeh Reed [Aladren]

“This is Janet. Can anyone tell me what species she is?”

Nevaeh glanced down in the direction she knew her service dog to be. Scout made no movements that were big enough for her to perceive, but she liked to at least pretend that her understood her sceptic sarcasm. She raised her hand, but fortunately, she was not called upon for the answer, because the actual answer - Augurey - was probably more helpful to the group than hers would have been. She was going to say something along the lines of “greenish blob”, which was simply not specific enough.

Professor Taransay instructed the class to draw the bird “for a purpose”, and Nevaeh couldn’t help rolling her eyes. Fortunately, she was seated beside Raine, who had an idea for a more functional arrangement. “That sounds good to me,” Nevaeh agreed. “I was gonna just draw the long blobby shape I see, but, like, your plan is definitely better.”

A crooked grin spread across her face as Raine mentioned the little research project she had taken upon herself. What a Teppenpaw, this girl was. “Raine, that’s… that’s awesome,” said Nevaeh earnestly. She wasn’t one to necessarily get super emotional, but she was definitely going to have some Feelings about that gesture later on, when she was fairly confident there was nobody around except Scout.

“Um, as to the purpose thing…” she pondered, trying to get back on track and distract herself from any preemptive Feelings trying to happen, “Maybe he just means we should label body parts? We could include what they do? Like, Augureys are the ones that sing when it’s gonna rain, right? So maybe we put a note about that with an arrow to the beak? I don’t know. If he’s gonna be vague about it, I can’t imagine he’ll mark us down for not doing exactly what he had in mind, anyway.”

12 Nevaeh Reed [Aladren] Bird art, from what I can tell. 325 Nevaeh Reed [Aladren] 0 5

Raine

June 22, 2017 4:56 AM

With a Mysterious Purpose by Raine

“I’m definitely not awesome at it yet,” Raine informed the other girl, blushing rather furiously at Nevaeh’s compliment. She hoped she could produce a halfway decent card by the next occasion she had to give Nevaeh one but she didn’t want her to get her hopes up - it was entirely possible that Raine wouldn’t be able to manage much except indistinct wibbly shapes, especially as she now had so much else to do with her time. If she had been more confident, she would have presented this last Christmas, passing it off as melting snowmen, which might have been quite a good joke, but Raine was too self-conscious and too much of a perfectionist. Her teachers might have struggled to believe that last part, but for those things that really mattered to her, she was very exacting. She was going to spend a term of blood, sweat and tears on her circus performance, and she still knew that if it was not good enough then it would not be right to show it. If she tried her best and failed to live up to the required standard, her mother would still be proud of her for trying, but not so much so that she’d let her be in the show. Sometimes, your best was not good enough. Sometimes, you had to get something right, or there were consequences.

“That makes sense,” she nodded, when Nevaeh mentioned about labelling it. She felt Nevaeh was being over-generous in her analysis of teachers and their whims though. In Raine’s experience, it was exactly like a teacher to lead them along with vague hints and then get cross when they didn’t do it right. Still, she had a lot more faith in not running afoul of Professor Taransay with Nevaeh to help her. She didn’t venture to contradict Nevaeh on how mean teachers, as a species, could be, nor did she add in the fact that augureys singing meant someone would die, as she was sure Nevaeh knew that too and just didn’t want to bring bad luck by mentioning it.

“Maybe you can start reading and looking for important parts that we’ll need to label, and then I can try to make them clear in my picture?” she suggested, pulling out her pencils and beginning to sketch the Augurey. “I can’t go straight into the embossing charms yet. I kind of have to draw it out to give myself something to work with,” she explained. She had tried a few times, and the shapes had ended up spreading uncontrollably or unevenly.

13 Raine With a Mysterious Purpose 327 Raine 0 5

Nevaeh

July 10, 2017 11:48 AM

Sigh. These professors and their mysteriousness. by Nevaeh

It always struck Nevaeh when it became apparent: Raine’s level of confidence (or, rather, lack thereof). She didn’t get it. Raine was great. Definitely Nevaeh’s best friend in her year, although she loved the others dearly as well. The way that the Teppenpaw backpedaled from compliments was just tragic, really, which was why Nevaeh tried to keep giving them to her, hoping that sometime she would just believe them, wholly and fully. Nevaeh didn’t consider herself particularly overconfident, but she had definitely been raised to know self-worth.

“Works for me,” she reported, cracking open her textbook and flipping through pages while she felt the corners in search of the page number she thought she remembered covering the subject. Soon enough she found it, and her memory was proved correct, so she began scanning over the page, absorbing the information fairly quickly. The fourth year had a lot of practice reading in this manner, and in fact could almost be considered a speed reader, depending on one’s interpretation of what exactly qualified.

“Okay,” she announced. “From what I can tell, we should definitely label some of the feathers, since apparently they can repel ink. And they have really long tails I guess, so maybe we should label that just because it’s cool. Also probably the beak. It says they’re particularly sharp. Plus we should probably mention that they sing when it’s going to rain. I guess that should go with the beak, too.”

Nevaeh glanced in the direction of her friend, although to no practical avail. She couldn’t really see her, but the Aladren knew that looking at the person one was speaking to was usually considered more polite. “How does that sound so far?” she asked.

12 Nevaeh Sigh. These professors and their mysteriousness. 325 Nevaeh 0 5