Muralist's Mark (Patreon)

Wondrous item, very rare (requires attunement)

This painter's apron is covered with smears of paint, which never entirely dry. While wearing the apron, you can use it and the paints on it as if it were a painter's palette, mixing and manipulating the colors on it indefinitely. The apron magically produces paints in whatever colors you need.

While wearing the apron, you gain a +5 bonus to any ability check made using a set of painter's supplies. Using the apron's paints and your hands, the muralist's mark can be used on its own as a set of painter's supplies.

Impression. While touching a flat surface and wearing the apron, you can use an action to meld yourself and all the equipment you carry with the surface. The surface must be large enough to fully contain your body. For the duration, you remain visible on the melded surface, but only as a painted rendering of your appearance.

This rendering moves with you along the surface. You are indistinguishable from a normal painting while you remain motionless in this form. You retain your normal movement while melded with the surface, obeying gravity as if you were in your normal form. If the surface you're melded with is rotated or turned upside down, you move in such a way according to gravity's pull. While in this form, you can only interact with objects that are flush against the surface (such as a table, frame, or painted line), treating each one as if it were a ledge, wall, or similar surface. For example, you could use a series of hanging picture frames to climb up a tall gallery wall, or slide back down along a painted line.

You can use a bonus action to change your rendering's artistic style and size, down to a minimum height of 1 foot or up to your normal height, proportionally. You can only move along the flat surface if it can fit your painted form. By doing so, you can follow a surface around corners or climb onto ceilings or floors, provided that the two surfaces are contiguous.

While merged with the surface, you can see and hear what occurs outside it using your normal senses. You remain aware of the passage of time and can cast spells on yourself while merged in the surface.

Minor physical damage to the surface doesn't harm you, but its partial destruction or a change in its shape (to the extent that you no longer fit within it) expels you and deals 6d6 bludgeoning damage to you. The surface's complete destruction (or transmutation into a different substance) expels you and deals 50 bludgeoning damage to you. If expelled, you fall prone in the unoccupied space closest to where you were on the surface.

You can remain in this form for up to 1 hour, all at once or in several shorter bursts, each one using a minimum of 5 minutes from the duration. You can end the effect early using a bonus action. When the effect ends, you reappear in the nearest unoccupied space to your location on the surface. The apron regains 5 minutes of melding capability for every 1 hour it's not in use.

Guarding the museum of art was a cushy position. The old captain had taken the position in lieu of retiring; she just had to patrol, watching in case some fool got themselves in overnight.

That, and she felt it her duty to speak with the portraits. Gods knew she was lonely in the gallery, and—silly as she knew it was—they must be lonelier still, hung on cold walls only to be gawked at. General Stoneface, her ladyship, Saen and M'lilah, the lanky painter, all familiar friends, all… wait, wasn't that last one supposed to be a landscape?

She wheeled around, taking stock again, and… just the usual rolling hills. Yeesh, working nights was getting to her.

As she turned to continue her patrol, a vibrant silhouette peeked out from behind the painting's frame, bending around the ornate goldwork before letting go, melding into the floor.