"Painting sounds good to me.  We defaced our old iconography dedicated to Eiseth, and still haven't finished painting over it with new art.  Well, I guess we'll leave it all behind if we move here, but our potential location here needs a lot of work to look nicer as well."

Then he would be happy to have her attend! He’s something of an expert at making buildings distinctly unasmodean and pleasurable to live in.

Ilda attempts a smile, but it is more like a momentary twitch of her lips than even a subtle smile.

Ilda actually dislikes Thea's austere ascetic preferences, it is one of the more annoying things about the change from Eiseth to Irori.  Luckily Thea is easily sold on making their abbey less infernal in aesthetics, which some nice art counts as, as long as it doesn't cross the line into luxury or decadence.  She doesn't want to get into this with an outsider though.  So, back to practical questions.

"Are you planning on staying in this city long term?  Or are you going to leave once you've reached a key milestone, like getting enough local support for Shelyn's temple to be self-sustaining?"

“I’m not sure. I don’t plan to stay here forever, but there’s not enough water as it is and as long as the convention is ongoing there isn’t anyone else with enough healing either. Less than four years, I expect, but I don’t know how much less just yet.

Not enough water sounds great!  During a dry month, Thea once made 50 silvers for a few hours of filling cisterns.

“Perhaps in that time the beneficent Gods will see fit to choose more people?  At least enough to cover the essential basic like water?”

It’s something Thea’s had fretted over but didn’t find any way of guessing, maybe an educated cleric will have a better guess?

"In time, yes, but I do not expect it will be swift; it is the work of years to help people grow close enough to the gods to be chosen, where it can be done at all. In Andoran we have perhaps four times as many clerics per person as Cheliax does now, but they were rarer when I was growing up and in some places the shortages lasted years after the revolution."

That’s great for the abbey, it’ll mean enough time for the youngest sisters to grow up before Thea’s spells stop being so valuable.  Ilda continues to have the bare minimum of sense not to say this out loud.

“I think that’s all the questions I had, I’ll see you this evening for the painting class?”

"Yes, I'll see you then!"

She wanders the city for a few hours, trying to feel it out, but even with Dia’s preparation, she’s not actually skilled at drawing people into conversation, so she doesn’t learn anything notable from talking.  She does directly see and collect some basic information: the number of former Asmodean temples, which areas are poorer and richer, the number of ships in the harbor, and a few other such markers of the city’s health.

Finally she returns in the evening.

She's not the only one! The building is hardly packed, but regardless of whether it's because of interest in the arts, the free paints, or just a desire to curry favor with the city's strongest priest, a few dozen people arrived before Ilda did. Armando is wandering the room, talking with his flock as they get set up.

She eyes the other attendees, mentally tabulating age, social status, genders, and apparent wealth.  She may not have an instinct for how to use that information, but she can accurately remember it to pass on to Thea and Dia.

About half the room seems to be comfortably part of chelish middle class, the other half spread out lower along the social strata; there are more women then men, but not by much. Only one of them aside from Armando is someone she would peg as locally important in their own right rather than as a constituency.

She isn't sure of the implications of the spread of social strata, but she remembers it anyway.  She doesn't need any information from anyone in particular, so she doesn't bother trying to introduce herself to anyone.  With no other priorities, she starts trying to figure out what to do to get setup to get painting.

There's only one kind of paper - the mass produced stuff that the Archmage Cotonett has been driving the price of through the floor - but she's got a wide array of paints to choose from, and a few kinds of brushes. There's a smattering of everyday objects around that some people seem to be using as reference material for their own work, but only about a third of the people there seem to be making use of them while everyone else draws from memory or abstraction. 

Armando is walking around, giving snippets of advice here and there - how to hold a brush so you have better control of it, how to keep your paint from dripping, and such, but he seems to favor a style of teaching where people learn mostly by doing and he fills in the gaps.

Ilda gets started!  She has a simple plan of what to paint: a snail squishing/eating a serpent!  She knows how to draw a simple stylized snail, so she gets started with that part first.  That part at least is coming out decent, is rather simple and stylized.

And his path eventually takes him around to her, where he has some advice! If she gets less paint on the brush, it will run and smudge a bit less, and for some shapes she can hold bits of scrap paper like so to keep any excess liquid from getting into the wrong area of her painting-

She’s happy to take the advice!  Her picture is shaping up rather decently, she has some basic practice from helping repaint her abbey’s iconography, and the songbird’s advice helps bring it to another level.

She’s not sure what to add once she’s got the basic snail killing snake down.  Some abstract colors?  A background of nature scenery?  Some geometric patterns?  She’ll ask for input after a few minutes of thinking.