by John Ruskin
LETTER I.
ON FIRST PRACTICE.
MY DEAR READER:
Whether this book is to be of use to you or not, depends wholly on yourreason for wishing to learn to draw. If you desire only to possess agraceful accomplishment, to be able to converse in a fluent manner aboutdrawing, or to amuse yourself listlessly in listless hours, I cannothelp you: but if you wish to learn drawing that you may be able to setdown clearly, and usefully, records of such things as cannot bedescribed in words, either to assist your own memory of them, or toconvey distinct ideas of them to other people; if you wish to obtainquicker perceptions of the beauty of the natural world, and to preservesomething like a true image of beautiful things that pass away, or whichyou must yourself leave; if, also, you wish to understand the minds ofgreat painters, and to be able to appreciate their work sincerely,seeing it for yourself, and loving it, not merely taking up the thoughtsof other people about it; then I _can_ help you, or, which is better,show you how to help yourself.
Only you must understand, first of all, that these powers which indeedare noble and desirable, cannot be got without work. It is much easierto learn to draw well, than it is to learn to play well on any musicalinstrument; but you know that it takes three or four years of practice,giving three or four hours a day, to acquire even ordinary command overthe keys of a piano; and you must not think that a masterly command ofyour pencil, and the knowledge of what may be done with it, can beacquired without painstaking, or in a very short time. The kind ofdrawing which is taught, or supposed to be taught, in our schools, in aterm or two, perhaps at the rate of an hour's practice a week, is notdrawing at all. It is only the performance of a few dexterous (notalways even that) evolutions on paper with a black-lead pencil;profitless alike to performer and beholder, unless as a matter ofvanity, and that the smallest possible vanity. If any young person,after being taught what is, in polite circles, called "drawing," willtry to copy the commonest piece of real _work_--suppose a lithograph onthe title-page of a new opera air, or a woodcut in the cheapestillustrated newspaper of the day--they will find themselves entirelybeaten. And yet that common lithograph was drawn with coarse chalk, muchmore difficult to manage than the pencil of which an accomplished younglady is supposed to have command; and that woodcut was drawn in urgenthaste, and half spoiled in the cutting afterwards; and both were done bypeople whom nobody thinks of as artists, or praises for their power;both were done for daily bread, with no more artist's pride than anysimple handicraftsmen feel in the work they live by.
Do not, therefore, think that you can learn drawing, any more than a newlanguage, without some hard and disagreeable labour. But do not, on theother hand, if you are ready and willing to pay this price, fear thatyou may be unable to get on for want of special talent. It is indeedtrue that the persons who have peculiar talent for art, drawinstinctively and get on almost without teaching; though never withouttoil. It is true, also, that of inferior talent for drawing there aremany degrees; it will take one person a much longer time than another toattain the same results, and the results thus painfully attained arenever quite so satisfactory as those got with greater ease when thefaculties are naturally adapted to the study. But I have never yet, inthe experiments I have made, met with a person who could not learn todraw at all; and, in general, there is a satisfactory and availablepower in every one to learn drawing if he wishes, just as nearly allpersons have the power of learning French, Latin, or arithmetic, in adecent and useful degree, if their lot in life requires them to possesssuch knowledge.
Supposing then that you are ready to take a certain amount of pains, andto bear a little irksomeness and a few disappointments bravely, I canpromise you that an hour's practice a day for six months, or an hour'spractice every other day for twelve months, or, disposed in whatever wayyou find convenient, some hundred and fifty hours' practice, will giveyou sufficient power of drawing faithfully whatever you want to draw,and a good judgment, up to a certain point, of other people's work: ofwhich hours, if you have one to spare at present, we may as well beginat once.
EXERCISE I.
Everything that you can see, in the world around you, presents itself toyour eyes only as an arrangement of patches of different coloursvariously shaded.[199] Some of these patches of colour have anappearance of lines or texture within them, as a piece of cloth or silkhas of threads, or an animal's skin shows texture of hairs; but whetherthis be the case or not, the first broad aspect of the thing is that ofa patch of some definite colour; and the first thing to be learned is,how to produce extents of smooth colour, without texture.
This can only be done properly with a brush; but a brush, being soft atthe point, causes so much uncertainty in the touch of an unpractisedhand, that it is hardly possible to learn to draw first with it, and itis better to take, in early practice, some instrument with a hard andfine point, both that we may give some support to the hand, and that byworking over the subject with so delicate a point, the attention may beproperly directed to all the most minute parts of it. Even the bestartists need occasionally to study subjects with a pointed instrument,in order thus to discipline their attention: and a beginner must becontent to do so for a considerable period.
Also, observe that before we trouble ourselves about differences ofcolour, we must be able to lay on _one_ colour properly, in whatevergradations of depth and whatever shapes we want. We will try, therefore,first to lay on tints or patches of _grey_, of whatever depth we want,with a pointed instrument. Take any finely-pointed steel pen (one ofGillott's lithographic crow-quills is best), and a piece of quitesmooth, but not shining, note-paper, cream-laid, and get some ink thathas stood already some time in the inkstand, so as to be quite black,and as thick as it can be without clogging the pen. Take a rule, anddraw four straight lines, so as to enclose a square or nearly a square,about as large as _a_, Fig. 1. I say nearly a square, because it doesnot in the least matter whether it is quite square or not, the objectbeing merely to get a space enclosed by straight lines.
FIG. 1.]
Now, try to fill in that square space with crossed lines, so completelyand evenly that it shall look like a square patch of grey silk or cloth,cut out and laid on the white paper, as at _b_. Cover it quickly, firstwith straightish lines, in any direction you like, not troublingyourself to draw them much closer or neater than those in the square_a_. Let them quite dry before retouching them. (If you draw three orfour squares side by side, you may always be going on with one while theothers are drying). Then cover these lines with others in a differentdirection, and let those dry; then in another direction still, and letthose dry. Always wait long enough to run no risk of blotting, and thendraw the lines as quickly as you can. Each ought to be laid on asswiftly as the dash of the pen of a good writer; but if you try to reachthis great speed at first you will go over the edge of the square, whichis a fault in this exercise. Yet it is better to do so now and then thanto draw the lines very slowly; for if you do, the pen leaves a littledot of ink at the end of each line, and these dots spoil your work. Sodraw each line quickly, stopping always as nearly as you can at the edgeof the square. The ends of lines which go over the edge are afterwardsto be removed with the penknife, but not till you have done the wholework, otherwise you roughen the paper, and the next line that goes overthe edge makes a blot.
When you have gone over the whole three or four times, you will findsome parts of the square look darker than other parts. Now try to makethe lighter parts as dark as the rest, so that the whole may be of equaldepth or darkness. You will find, on examining the work, that where itlooks darkest the lines are closest, or there are some much darkerlines, than elsewhere; therefore you must put in other lines, or littlescratches and dots, _between_ the lines in the paler parts; and wherethere are very conspicuous dark lines, scratch them out lightly with thepenknife, for the eye must not be attracted by any line in particular.The more carefully and delicately you fill in the little gaps and holesthe better; you will get on faster by doing two or three squaresperfec
tly than a great many badly. As the tint gets closer and begins tolook even, work with very little ink in your pen, so as hardly to makeany mark on the paper; and at last, where it is too dark, use the edgeof your penknife very lightly, and for some time, to wear it softly intoan even tone. You will find that the greatest difficulty consists ingetting evenness: one bit will always look darker than another bit ofyour square; or there will be a granulated and sandy look over thewhole. When you find your paper quite rough and in a mess, give it upand begin another square, but do not rest satisfied till you have doneyour best with every square. The tint at last ought _at least_ to be asclose and even as that in _b_, Fig. 1. You will find, however, that itis very difficult to get a _pale_ tint; because, naturally, the inklines necessary to produce a close tint at all, blacken the paper morethan you want. You must get over this difficulty not so much by leavingthe lines wide apart as by trying to draw them excessively fine, lightlyand swiftly; being very cautious in filling in; and, at last, passingthe penknife over the whole. By keeping several squares in progress atone time, and reserving your pen for the light one just when the ink isnearly exhausted, you may get on better. The paper ought, at last, tolook lightly and evenly toned all over, with no lines distinctlyvisible.
EXERCISE II.
As this exercise in shading is very tiresome, it will be well to vary itby proceeding with another at the same time. The power of shadingrightly depends mainly on _lightness_ of hand and _keenness_ of sight;but there are other qualities required in drawing, dependent not merelyon lightness, but steadiness of hand; and the eye, to be perfect in itspower, must be made _accurate_ as well as keen, and not only seeshrewdly, but measure justly.
Possess yourself, therefore, of any cheap work on botany containing_outline_ plates of leaves and flowers, it does not matter whether bador good: "Baxter's British Flowering Plants" is quite good enough. Copyany of the simplest outlines, first with a soft pencil, following it, bythe eye, as nearly as you can; if it does not look right in proportions,rub out and correct it, always by the eye, till you think it is right:when you have got it to your mind, lay tracing-paper on the book, onthis paper trace the outline you have been copying, and apply it to yourown; and having thus ascertained the faults, correct them all patiently,till you have got it as nearly accurate as may be. Work with a very softpencil, and do not rub out so hard[200] as to spoil the surface of yourpaper; never mind how _dirty_ the paper gets, but do not roughen it;and let the false outlines alone where they do not really interfere withthe true one. It is a good thing to accustom yourself to hew and shapeyour drawing out of a dirty piece of paper. When you have got it asright as you can, take a quill pen, not very fine at the point; restyour hand on a book about an inch and a half thick, so as to hold thepen long; and go over your pencil outline with ink, raising your penpoint as seldom as possible, and never leaning more heavily on one partof the line than on another. In most outline drawings of the presentday, parts of the curves are thickened to give an effect of shade; allsuch outlines are bad, but they will serve well enough for yourexercises, provided you do not imitate this character: it is better,however, if you can, to choose a book of pure outlines. It does not inthe least matter whether your pen outline be thin or thick; but itmatters greatly that it should be _equal_, not heavier in one place thanin another. The power to be obtained is that of drawing an even lineslowly and in any direction; all _dashing_ lines, or approximations topenmanship, are bad. The pen should, as it were, walk slowly over theground, and you should be able at any moment to stop it, or to turn itin any other direction, like a well-managed horse.
As soon as you can copy every curve _slowly_ and accurately, you havemade satisfactory progress; but you will find the difficulty is in the_slowness_. It is easy to draw what appears to be a good line with asweep of the hand, or with what is called freedom;[201] the realdifficulty and masterliness is in never letting the hand _be_ free, butkeeping it under entire control at every part of the line.
EXERCISE III.
Meantime, you are always to be going on with your shaded squares, andchiefly with these, the outline exercises being taken up only for rest.
FIG. 2.]
As soon as you find you have some command of the pen as a shadinginstrument, and can lay a pale or dark tint as you choose, try toproduce gradated spaces like Fig. 2., the dark tint passing graduallyinto the lighter ones. Nearly _all_ expression of form, in drawing,depends on your power of gradating delicately; and the gradation isalways most skilful which passes from one tint into another _verylittle_ paler. Draw, therefore, two parallel lines for limits to yourwork, as in Fig. 2., and try to gradate the shade evenly from white toblack, passing over the greatest possible distance, yet so that everypart of the band may have visible change in it. The perception ofgradation is very deficient in all beginners (not to say, in manyartists), and you will probably, for some time, think your gradationskilful enough when it is quite patchy and imperfect. By getting a pieceof grey shaded riband, and comparing it with your drawing, you mayarrive, in early stages of your work, at a wholesome dissatisfactionwith it. Widen your band little by little as you get more skilful, so asto give the gradation more lateral space, and accustom yourself at thesame time to look for gradated spaces in Nature. The sky is the largestand the most beautiful; watch it at twilight, after the sun is down, andtry to consider each pane of glass in the window you look through as apiece of paper coloured blue, or grey, or purple, as it happens to be,and observe how quietly and continuously the gradation extends over thespace in the window, of one or two feet square. Observe the shades onthe outside and inside of a common white cup or bowl, which make it lookround and hollow;[202] and then on folds of white drapery; and thusgradually you will be led to observe the more subtle transitions of thelight as it increases or declines on flat surfaces. At last, when youreye gets keen and true, you will see gradation on everything in Nature.
But it will not be in your power yet awhile to draw from any objects inwhich the gradations are varied and complicated; nor will it be a badomen for your future progress, and for the use that art is to be made ofby you, if the first thing at which you aim should be a little bit ofsky. So take any narrow space of evening sky, that you can usually see,between the boughs of a tree, or between two chimneys, or through thecorner of a pane in the window you like best to sit at, and try togradate a little space of white paper as evenly as that is gradated--as_tenderly_ you cannot gradate it without colour, no, nor with coloureither; but you may do it as evenly; or, if you get impatient with yourspots and lines of ink, when you look at the beauty of the sky, thesense you will have gained of that beauty is something to be thankfulfor. But you ought not to be impatient with your pen and ink; for allgreat painters, however delicate their perception of colour, are fond ofthe peculiar effect of light which may be got in a pen-and-ink sketch,and in a woodcut, by the gleaming of the white paper between the blacklines; and if you cannot gradate well with pure black lines, you willnever gradate well with pale ones. By looking at any common woodcuts, inthe cheap publications of the day, you may see how gradation is given tothe sky by leaving the lines farther and farther apart; but you mustmake your lines as _fine_ as you can, as well as far apart, towards thelight; and do not try to make them long or straight, but let them crossirregularly in any direction easy to your hand, depending on nothing buttheir gradation for your effect. On this point of direction of lines,however, I shall have to tell you more presently; in the meantime, donot trouble yourself about it.
EXERCISE IV.
As soon as you find you can gradate tolerably with the pen, take an H.or HH. pencil, using its point to produce shade, from the darkestpossible to the palest, in exactly the same manner as the pen,lightening, however, now with India-rubber instead of the penknife. Youwill find that all _pale_ tints of shade are thus easily producible withgreat precision and tenderness, but that you cannot get the same darkpower as with the pen and ink, and that the surface of the shade is aptto become glossy and metallic, or dirty-loo
king, or sandy. Persevere,however, in trying to bring it to evenness with the fine point, removingany single speck or line that may be too black, with the _point_ of theknife: you must not scratch the whole with the knife as you do the ink.If you find the texture very speckled-looking, lighten it all over withIndia-rubber, and recover it again with sharp, and excessively finetouches of the pencil point, bringing the parts that are too pale toperfect evenness with the darker spots.
You cannot use the point too delicately or cunningly in doing this; workwith it as if you were drawing the down on a butterfly's wing.
At this stage of your progress, if not before, you may be assured thatsome clever friend will come in, and hold up his hands in mockingamazement, and ask you who could set you to that "niggling;" and if youpersevere in it, you will have to sustain considerable persecution fromyour artistical acquaintances generally, who will tell you that all gooddrawing depends on "boldness." But never mind them. You do not hear themtell a child, beginning music, to lay its little hand with a crash amongthe keys, in imitation of the great masters; yet they might, asreasonably as they may tell you to be bold in the present state of yourknowledge. Bold, in the sense of being undaunted, yes; but bold in thesense of being careless, confident, or exhibitory,--no,--no, and athousand times no; for, even if you were not a beginner, it would be badadvice that made you bold. Mischief may easily be done quickly, but goodand beautiful work is generally done slowly; you will find no boldnessin the way a flower or a bird's wing is painted; and if Nature is notbold at _her_ work, do you think you ought to be at _yours_? So nevermind what people say, but work with your pencil point very patiently;and if you can trust me in anything, trust me when I tell you, thatthough there are all kinds and ways of art,--large work for largeplaces, small work for narrow places, slow work for people who can wait,and quick work for people who cannot,--there is one quality, and, Ithink, only one, in which all great and good art agrees;--it is all_delicate_ art. Coarse art is always bad art. You cannot understand thisat present, because you do not know yet how much tender thought, andsubtle care, the great painters put into touches that at first lookcoarse; but, believe me, it is true, and you will find it is so in duetime.
You will be perhaps also troubled, in these first essays at pencildrawing, by noticing that more delicate gradations are got in an instantby a chance touch of the India-rubber, than by an hour's labour with thepoint; and you may wonder why I tell you to produce tints so painfully,which might, it appears, be obtained with ease. But there are tworeasons: the first, that when you come to draw forms, you must be ableto gradate with absolute precision, in whatever place and direction youwish; not in any wise vaguely, as the India-rubber does it; and,secondly, that all natural shadows are more or less mingled with gleamsof light. In the darkness of ground there is the light of the littlepebbles or dust; in the darkness of foliage, the glitter of the leaves;in the darkness of flesh, transparency; in that of a stone, granulation:in every case there is some mingling of light, which cannot berepresented by the leaden tone which you get by rubbing, or by aninstrument known to artists as the "stump." When you can manage thepoint properly, you will indeed be able to do much also with thisinstrument, or with your fingers; but then you will have to retouch theflat tints afterwards, so as to put life and light into them, and thatcan only be done with the point. Labour on, therefore, courageously,with that only.
EXERCISE V.
FIG. 3.]
When you can manage to tint and gradate tenderly with the pencil point,get a good large alphabet, and try to _tint_ the letters into shape withthe pencil point. Do not outline them first, but measure their heightand extreme breadth with the compasses, as _a b_, _a c_, Fig. 3., andthen scratch in their shapes gradually; the letter A, enclosed withinthe lines, being in what Turner would have called a "state offorwardness."
Then, when you are satisfied with the shape of the letter, draw pen andink lines firmly round the tint, as at _d_, and remove any touchesoutside the limit, first with the India-rubber, and then with thepenknife, so that all may look clear and right. If you rub out any ofthe pencil inside the outline of the letter, retouch it, closing it upto the inked line. The straight lines of the outline are all to be_ruled_,[203] but the curved lines are to be drawn by the eye and hand;and you will soon find what good practice there is in getting the curvedletters, such as Bs, Cs, &c., to stand quite straight, and come intoaccurate form.
All these exercises are very irksome, and they are not to be persistedin alone; neither is it necessary to acquire perfect power in any ofthem. An entire master of the pencil or brush ought, indeed, to be ableto draw any form at once, as Giotto his circle; but such skill as thisis only to be expected of the consummate master, having pencil in handall his life, and all day long, hence the force of Giotto's proof of hisskill; and it is quite possible to draw very beautifully, withoutattaining even an approximation to such a power; the main point being,not that every line should be precisely what we intend or wish, but thatthe line which we intended or wished to draw should be right. If wealways see rightly and mean rightly, we shall get on, though the handmay stagger a little; but if we mean wrongly, or mean nothing, it doesnot matter how firm the hand is. Do not, therefore, torment yourselfbecause you cannot do as well as you would like; but work patiently,sure that every square and letter will give you a certain increase ofpower; and as soon as you can draw your letters pretty well, here is amore amusing exercise for you.
EXERCISE VI.
Choose any tree that you think pretty, which is nearly bare of leaves,and which you can see against the sky, or against a pale wall, or otherlight ground: it must not be against strong light, or you will find thelooking at it hurts your eyes; nor must it be in sunshine, or you willbe puzzled by the lights on the boughs. But the tree must be in shade;and the sky blue, or grey, or dull white. A wholly grey or rainy day isthe best for this practice.
You will see that _all_ the boughs of the tree are _dark_ against thesky. Consider them as so many dark rivers, to be laid down in a map withabsolute accuracy; and, without the least thought about the _roundness_of the stems, map them all out in flat shade, scrawling them in withpencil, just as you did the limbs of your letters; then correct andalter them, rubbing out and out again, never minding how much your paperis dirtied (only not destroying its surface), until every bough isexactly, or as near as your utmost power can bring it, right incurvature and in thickness. Look at the white interstices between themwith as much scrupulousness as if they were little estates which you hadto survey, and draw maps of, for some important lawsuit, involving heavypenalties if you cut the least bit of a corner off any of them, or gavethe hedge anywhere too deep a curve; and try continually to fancy thewhole tree nothing but a flat ramification on a white ground. Do nottake any trouble about the little twigs, which look like a confusednetwork or mist; leave them all out,[204] drawing only the main branchesas far as you can see them distinctly, your object at present being notto draw a tree, but to _learn how_ to do so. When you have got the thingas nearly right as you can--and it is better to make one good study thantwenty left unnecessarily inaccurate--take your pen, and put a fineoutline to all the boughs, as you did to your letter, taking care, asfar as possible, to put the outline within the edge of the shade, so asnot to make the boughs thicker: the main use of the outline is to_affirm_ the whole more clearly; to do away with little accidentalroughnesses and excrescences, and especially to mark where boughs cross,or come in front of each other, as at such points their arrangement inthis kind of sketch is unintelligible without the outline. It mayperfectly well happen that in Nature it should be less distinct thanyour outline will make it; but it is better in this kind of sketch tomark the facts clearly. The temptation is always to be slovenly andcareless, and the outline is like a bridle, and forces our indolenceinto attention and precision. The outline should be about the thicknessof that in Fig. 4, which represents the ramification of a small stonepine, only I have not endeavoured to represent the pencil shading withinthe outline
, as I could not easily express it in a woodcut; and you havenothing to do at present with the indication of the foliage above, ofwhich in another place. You may also draw your trees as much largerthan this figure as you like; only, however large they may be, keep theoutline as delicate, and draw the branches far enough into their outersprays to give quite as slender ramification as you have in this figure,otherwise you do not get good enough practice out of them.
FIG. 4.]
You cannot do too many studies of this kind: every one will give yousome new notion about trees: but when you are tired of tree boughs, takeany forms whatever which are drawn in flat colour, one upon another; aspatterns on any kind of cloth, or flat china (tiles, for instance),executed in two colours only; and practice drawing them of the rightshape and size by the eye, and filling them in with shade of the depthrequired.
In doing this, you will first have to meet the difficulty ofrepresenting depth of colour by depth of shade. Thus a pattern ofultramarine blue will have to be represented by a darker tint of greythan a pattern of yellow.
And now it is both time for you to begin to learn the mechanical use ofthe brush, and necessary for you to do so in order to provide yourselfwith the gradated scale of colour which you will want. If you can, byany means, get acquainted with any ordinarily skilful water-colourpainter, and prevail on him to show you how to lay on tints with abrush, by all means do so; not that you are yet, nor for a long whileyet, to begin to colour, but because the brush is often more convenientthan the pencil for laying on masses or tints of shade, and the sooneryou know how to manage it as an instrument the better. If, however, youhave no opportunity of seeing how water-colour is laid on by a workmanof any kind, the following directions will help you:--
EXERCISE VII.
Get a shilling cake of Prussian blue. Dip the end of it in water so asto take up a drop, and rub it in a white saucer till you cannot rub muchmore, and the colour gets dark, thick, and oily-looking. Put twoteaspoonfuls of water to the colour you have rubbed down, and mix itwell up with a camel's-hair brush about three quarters of an inch long.
Then take a piece of smooth, but not glossy, Bristol board orpasteboard; divide it, with your pencil and rule, into squares as largeas those of the very largest chess-board: they need not be perfectsquares, only as nearly so as you can quickly guess. Rest the pasteboardon something sloping as much as an ordinary desk; then, dipping yourbrush into the colour you have mixed, and taking up as much of theliquid as it will carry, begin at the top of one of the squares, and laya pond or runlet of colour along the top edge. Lead this pond of colourgradually downwards, not faster at one place than another, but as if youwere adding a row of bricks to a building, all along (only building downinstead of up), dipping the brush frequently so as to keep the colour asfull in that, and in as great quantity on the paper, as you can, so onlythat it does not run down anywhere in a little stream. But if it should,never mind; go on quietly with your square till you have covered it allin. When you get to the bottom, the colour will lodge there in a greatwave. Have ready a piece of blotting-paper; dry your brush on it, andwith the dry brush take up the superfluous colour as you would with asponge, till it all looks even.
In leading the colour down, you will find your brush continually go overthe edge of the square, or leave little gaps within it. Do not endeavourto retouch these, nor take much care about them; the great thing is toget the colour to lie smoothly where it reaches, not in alternate blotsand pale patches; try, therefore, to lead it over the square as fast aspossible, with such attention to your limit as you are able to give. Theuse of the exercise is, indeed, to enable you finally to strike thecolour up to the limit with perfect accuracy; but the first thing is toget it even, the power of rightly striking the edge comes only by timeand practice; even the greatest artists rarely can do this quiteperfectly.
When you have done one square, proceed to do another which does notcommunicate with it. When you have thus done all the alternate squares,as on a chess-board, turn the pasteboard upside down, begin again withthe first, and put another coat over it, and so on over all the others.The use of turning the paper upside down is to neutralise the increaseof darkness towards the bottom of the squares, which would otherwisetake place from the ponding of the colour.
Be resolved to use blotting-paper, or a piece of rag, instead of yourlips, to dry the brush. The habit of doing so, once acquired, will saveyou from much partial poisoning. Take care, however, always to draw thebrush from root to point, otherwise you will spoil it. You may even wipeit as you would a pen when you want it very dry, without doing harm,provided you do not crush it upwards. Get a good brush at first, andcherish it; it will serve you longer and better than many bad ones.
When you have done the squares all over again, do them a third time,always trying to keep your edges as neat as possible. When your colouris exhausted, mix more in the same proportions, two teaspoonfuls to asmuch as you can grind with a drop; and when you have done the alternatesquares three times over, as the paper will be getting very damp, anddry more slowly, begin on the white squares, and bring them up to thesame tint in the same way. The amount of jagged dark line which thenwill mark the limits of the squares will be the exact measure of yourunskilfulness.
As soon as you tire of squares draw circles (with compasses); and thendraw straight lines irregularly across circles, and fill up the spacesso produced between the straight line and the circumference; and thendraw any simple shapes of leaves, according to the exercise No. 2., andfill up those, until you can lay on colour quite evenly in any shape youwant.
You will find in the course of this practice, as you cannot always putexactly the same quantity of water to the colour, that the darker thecolour is, the more difficult it becomes to lay it on evenly. Therefore,when you have gained some definite degree of power, try to fill in theforms required with a full brush, and a dark tint, at once, instead oflaying several coats one over another; always taking care that the tint,however dark, be quite liquid; and that, after being laid on, so much ofit is absorbed as to prevent its forming a black line at the edge as itdries. A little experience will teach you how apt the colour is to dothis, and how to prevent it; not that it needs always to be prevented,for a great master in water-colours will sometimes draw a firm outline,when he _wants_ one, simply by letting the colour dry in this way at theedge.
When, however, you begin to cover complicated forms with the darkercolour, no rapidity will prevent the tint from drying irregularly as itis led on from part to part. You will then find the following methoduseful. Lay in the colour very pale and liquid; so pale, indeed, thatyou can only just see where it is on the paper. Lead it up to all theoutlines, and make it precise in form, keeping it thoroughly weteverywhere. Then, when it is all in shape, take the darker colour, andlay some of it _into_ the middle of the liquid colour. It will spreadgradually in a branchy kind of way, and you may now lead it up to theoutlines already determined, and play it with the brush till it fillsits place well; then let it dry, and it will be as flat and pure as asingle dash, yet defining all the complicated forms accurately.
Having thus obtained the power of laying on a tolerably flat tint, youmust try to lay on a gradated one. Prepare the colour with three or fourteaspoonfuls of water; then, when it is mixed, pour away abouttwo-thirds of it, keeping a teaspoonful of pale colour. Sloping yourpaper as before, draw two pencil lines all the way down, leaving a spacebetween them of the width of a square on your chess-board. Begin at thetop of your paper, between the lines; and having struck on the firstbrushful of colour, and led it down a little, dip your brush deep inwater, and mix up the colour on the plate quickly with as much morewater as the brush takes up at that one dip: then, with this palercolour, lead the tint farther down. Dip in water again, mix the colouragain, and thus lead down the tint, always dipping in water once betweeneach replenishing of the brush, and stirring the colour on the platewell, but as quickly as you can. Go on until the colour has become sopale that you cannot see it; then wash your
brush thoroughly in water,and carry the wave down a little farther with that, and then absorb itwith the dry brush, and leave it to dry.
If you get to the bottom of your paper before your colour gets pale, youmay either take longer paper, or begin, with the tint as it was when youleft off, on another sheet; but be sure to exhaust it to pure whitenessat last. When all is quite dry, recommence at the top with anothersimilar mixture of colour, and go down in the same way. Then again, andthen again, and so continually until the colour at the top of the paperis as dark as your cake of Prussian blue, and passes down into purewhite paper at the end of your column, with a perfectly smooth gradationfrom one into the other.
You will find at first that the paper gets mottled or wavy, instead ofevenly gradated; this is because at some places you have taken up morewater in your brush than at others, or not mixed it thoroughly on theplate, or led one tint too far before replenishing with the next.Practice only will enable you to do it well; the best artists cannotalways get gradations of this kind quite to their minds; nor do theyever leave them on their pictures without after touching.
As you get more power, and can strike the colour more quickly down, youwill be able to gradate in less compass;[205] beginning with a smallquantity of colour, and adding a drop of water, instead of a brushful;with finer brushes, also, you may gradate to a less scale. But slightskill will enable you to test the relations of colour to shade as far asis necessary for your immediate progress, which is to be done thus:--
Take cakes of lake, of gamboge, of sepia, of blue-black, of cobalt, andvermilion; and prepare gradated columns (exactly as you have done withthe Prussian blue) of the lake and blue-black.[206] Cut a narrow slipall the way down, of each gradated colour, and set the three slips sideby side; fasten them down, and rule lines at equal distances across allthe three, so as to divide them into fifty degrees, and number thedegrees of each, from light to dark, 1, 2, 3, &c. If you have gradatedthem rightly, the darkest part either of the red or blue will be nearlyequal in power to the darkest part of the blue-black, and any degree ofthe black slip will also, accurately enough for our purpose, balance inweight the degree similarly numbered in the red or the blue slip. Then,when you are drawing from objects of a crimson or blue colour, if youcan match their colour by any compartment of the crimson or blue in yourscales, the grey in the compartment of the grey scale marked with thesame number is the grey which must represent that crimson or blue inyour light and shade drawing.
Next, prepare scales with gamboge, cobalt, and vermilion. You will findthat you cannot darken these beyond a certain point;[207] for yellow andscarlet, so long as they remain yellow and scarlet, cannot approach toblack; we cannot have, properly speaking, a dark yellow or dark scarlet.Make your scales of full yellow, blue, and scarlet, half-way down;passing _then_ gradually to white. Afterwards use lake to darken theupper half of the vermilion and gamboge; and Prussian blue to darken thecobalt. You will thus have three more scales, passing from white nearlyto black, through yellow and orange, through sky-blue, and throughscarlet. By mixing the gamboge and Prussian blue you may make anotherwith green; mixing the cobalt and lake, another with violet; the sepiaalone will make a forcible brown one; and so on, until you have as manyscales as you like, passing from black to white through differentcolours. Then, supposing your scales properly gradated and equallydivided, the compartment or degree No. 1. of the grey will represent inchiaroscuro the No. 1. of all the other colours; No. 2. of grey the No.2. of the other colours, and so on.
It is only necessary, however, in this matter that you should understandthe principle; for it would never be possible for you to gradate yourscales so truly as to make them practically accurate and serviceable;and even if you could, unless you had about ten thousand scales, andwere able to change them faster than ever juggler changed cards, youcould not in a day measure the tints on so much as one side of afrost-bitten apple: but when once you fully understand the principle,and see how all colours contain as it were a certain quantity ofdarkness, or power of dark relief from white--some more, some less; andhow this pitch or power of each may be represented by equivalent valuesof grey, you will soon be able to arrive shrewdly at an approximation bya glance of the eye, without any measuring scale at all.
You must now go on, again with the pen, drawing patterns, and any shapesof shade that you think pretty, as veinings in marble, ortortoise-shell, spots in surfaces of shells, &c., as tenderly as youcan, in the darknesses that correspond to their colours; and when youfind you can do this successfully, it is time to begin rounding.
EXERCISE VIII.
Go out into your garden, or into the road, and pick up the first roundor oval stone you can find, not very white, nor very dark; and thesmoother it is the better, only it must not _shine_. Draw your tablenear the window, and put the stone, which I will suppose is about thesize of _a_ in Fig. 5. (it had better not be much larger), on a piece ofnot very white paper, on the table in front of you. Sit so that thelight may come from your left, else the shadow of the pencil pointinterferes with your sight of your work. You must not let the _sun_ fallon the stone, but only ordinary light: therefore choose a window whichthe sun does not come in at. If you can shut the shutters of the otherwindows in the room it will be all the better; but this is not of muchconsequence.
Now, if you can draw that stone, you can draw anything: I mean, anythingthat is drawable. Many things (sea foam, for instance) cannot be drawnat all, only the idea of them more or less suggested; but if you candraw the stone _rightly_, every thing within reach of art is also withinyours.
For all drawing depends, primarily, on your power of representing_Roundness_. If you can once do that, all the rest is easy andstraightforward; if you cannot do that, nothing else that you may beable to do will be of any use. For Nature is all made up of roundnesses;not the roundness of perfect globes, but of variously curved surfaces.Boughs are rounded, leaves are rounded, stones are rounded, clouds arerounded, cheeks are rounded, and curls are rounded: there is no moreflatness in the natural world than there is vacancy. The world itself isround, and so is all that is in it, more or less, except human work,which is often very flat indeed.
Therefore, set yourself steadily to conquer that round stone, and youhave won the battle.
Look your stone antagonist boldly in the face. You will see that theside of it next the window is lighter than most of the paper: that theside of it farthest from the window is darker than the paper; and thatthe light passes into the dark gradually, while a shadow is thrown tothe right _on_ the paper itself by the stone: the general appearance ofthings being more or less as in _a_, Fig. 5., the spots on the stoneexcepted, of which more presently.
Now, remember always what was stated in the outset, that every thing youcan see in Nature is seen only so far as it is lighter or darker thanthe things about it, or of a different colour from them. It is eitherseen as a patch of one colour on a ground of another; or as a pale thingrelieved from a dark thing, or a dark thing from a pale thing. And ifyou can put on patches of colour or shade of exactly the same size,shape, and gradations as those on the object and its ground, you willproduce the appearance of the object and its ground. The bestdraughtsman--Titian and Paul Veronese themselves--could do no more thanthis; and you will soon be able to get some power of doing it in aninferior way, if you once understand the exceeding simplicity of what isto be done. Suppose you have a brown book on a white sheet of paper, ona red tablecloth. You have nothing to do but to put on spaces of red,white, and brown, in the same shape, and gradated from dark to light inthe same degrees, and your drawing is done. If you will not look at whatyou see, if you try to put on brighter or duller colours than are there,if you try to put them on with a dash or a blot, or to cover your paperwith "vigorous" lines, or to produce anything, in fact, but the plain,unaffected, and finished tranquillity of the thing before you, you neednot hope to get on. Nature will show you nothing if you set yourself upfor her master. But forget yourself, and try to obey _her_, and you willfind obedience e
asier and happier than you think.
The real difficulties are to get the _refinement_ of the forms and the_evenness_ of the gradations. You may depend upon it, when you aredissatisfied with your work, it is always too coarse or too uneven. Itmay not be wrong--in all probability is not wrong, in any (so-called)_great_ point. But its edges are not true enough in outline; and itsshades are in blotches, or scratches, or full of white holes. Get itmore tender and more true, and you will find it is more powerful.
FIG. 5.]
Do not, therefore, think your drawing must be weak because you have afinely pointed pen in your hand. Till you can draw with that, you candraw with nothing; when you can draw with that, you can draw with a logof wood charred at the end. True boldness and power are only to begained by care. Even in fencing and dancing, all ultimate ease dependson early precision in the commencement; much more in singing ordrawing.
Now, I do not want you to copy Fig. 5., but to copy the stone before youin the way that Fig. 5. is done. To which end, first measure the extremelength of the stone with compasses, and mark that length on your paper;then, between the points marked, leave something like the form of thestone in light, scrawling the paper all over, round it, as at _b_, Fig.5. You cannot rightly see what the form of the stone really is till youbegin finishing, so sketch it in quite rudely; only rather leave too_much_ room for the high light, than too little: and then morecautiously fill in the shade, shutting the light gradually up, andputting in the dark cautiously on the dark side. You need not plagueyourself about accuracy of shape, because, till you have practised agreat deal, it is impossible for you to draw that shape quite truly, andyou must gradually gain correctness by means of these various exercises:what you have mainly to do at present is, to get the stone to look solidand round, not much minding what its exact contour is--only draw it asnearly right as you can without vexation; and you will get it _more_right by thus feeling your way to it in shade, than if you tried to drawthe outline at first. For you can _see_ no outline; what you see is onlya certain space of gradated shade, with other such spaces about it; andthose pieces of shade you are to imitate as nearly as you can, byscrawling the paper over till you get them to the right shape, with thesame gradations which they have in Nature. And this is really morelikely to be done well, if you have to fight your way through a littleconfusion in the sketch, than if you have an accurately traced outline.For instance, I was going to draw, beside _a_, another effect on thestone; reflected light bringing its dark side out from the background:but when I had laid on the first few touches, I thought it would bebetter to stop, and let you see how I had begun it, at _b_. In whichbeginning it will be observed that nothing is so determined but that Ican more or less modify, and add to or diminish the contour as I workon, the lines which suggest the outline being blended with the others ifI do not want them; and the having to fill up the vacancies and conquerthe irregularities of such a sketch, will probably secure a highercompletion at last, than if half an hour had been spent in getting atrue outline before beginning.
In doing this, however, take care not to get the drawing too dark. Inorder to ascertain what the shades of it really are, cut a round hole,about half the size of a pea, in a piece of white paper, the colour ofthat you use to draw on. Hold this bit of paper, with the hole in it,between you and your stone; and pass the paper backwards and forwards,so as to see the different portions of the stone (or other subject)through the hole. You will find that, thus, the circular hole looks likeone of the patches of colour you have been accustomed to match, onlychanging in depth as it lets different pieces of the stone be seenthrough it. You will be able thus actually to _match_ the colour of thestone, at any part of it, by tinting the paper beside the circularopening. And you will find that this opening never looks quite _black_,but that all the roundings of the stone are given by subdued greys.[208]
You will probably find, also, that some parts of the stone, or of thepaper it lies on, look luminous through the opening, so that the littlecircle then tells as a light spot instead of a dark spot. When this isso, you cannot imitate it, for you have no means of getting lightbrighter than white paper: but by holding the paper more sloped towardsthe light, you will find that many parts of the stone, which beforelooked light through the hole, then look dark through it; and if you canplace the paper in such a position that every part of the stone looksslightly dark, the little hole will tell always as a spot of shade, andif your drawing is put in the same light, you can imitate or match everygradation. You will be amazed to find, under these circumstances, howslight the differences of tint are, by which, through infinite delicacyof gradation, Nature can express form.
If any part of your subject will obstinately show itself as a lightthrough the hole, that part you need not hope to imitate. Leave itwhite, you can do no more.
When you have done the best you can to get the general form, proceed tofinish, by imitating the texture and all the cracks and stains of thestone as closely as you can; and note, in doing this, that cracks orfissures of any kind, whether between stones in walls, or in the grainof timber or rocks, or in any of the thousand other conditions theypresent, are never expressible by single black lines, or lines of simpleshadow. A crack must always have its complete system of light and shade,however small its scale. It is in reality a little _ravine_, with a darkor shady side, and light or sunny side, and, usually, shadow in thebottom. This is one of the instances in which it may be as well tounderstand the reason of the appearance; it is not often so in drawing,for the aspects of things are so subtle and confused that they cannot ingeneral be explained; and in the endeavour to explain some, we are sureto lose sight of others, while the natural overestimate of theimportance of those on which the attention is fixed, causes us toexaggerate them, so that merely _scientific_ draughtsmen caricature athird part of Nature, and miss two-thirds. The best scholar is he whoseeye is so keen as to see at once how the thing looks, and who need not,therefore, trouble himself with any reasons why it looks so: but fewpeople have this acuteness of perception; and to those who are destituteof it, a little pointing out of rule and reason will be a help,especially when a master is not near them. I never allow my own pupilsto ask the reason of anything, because, as I watch their work, I canalways show them how the thing is, and what appearance they are missingin it; but when a master is not by to direct the sight, science may,here and there, be allowed to do so in his stead.
Generally, then, every solid illumined object--for instance, the stoneyou are drawing--has a light side turned towards the light, a dark sideturned away from the light, and a shadow, which is cast on somethingelse (as by the stone on the paper it is set upon). You may sometimes beplaced so as to see only the light side and shadow, and sometimes onlythe dark side and shadow, and sometimes both, or either, without theshadow; but in most positions solid objects will show all the three, asthe stone does here.
Hold up your hand with the edge of it towards you, as you sit now withyour side to the window, so that the flat of your hand is turned to thewindow. You will see one side of your hand distinctly lighted, the otherdistinctly in shade. Here are light side and dark side, with no seenshadow; the shadow being detached, perhaps on the table, perhaps on theother side of the room; you need not look for it at present.
Take a sheet of note-paper, and holding it edgeways, as you hold yourhand, wave it up and down past the side of your hand which is turnedfrom the light, the paper being, of course, farther from the window. Youwill see, as it passes a strong gleam of light strike on your hand, andlight it considerably on its dark side. This light is _reflected_ light.It is thrown back from the paper (on which it strikes first in comingfrom the window) to the surface of your hand, just as a ball would be ifsomebody threw it through the window at the wall and you caught it atthe rebound.
Next, instead of the note-paper, take a red book, or a piece of scarletcloth. You will see that the gleam of light falling on your hand, as youwave the book is now reddened. Take a blue book, and you will find thegleam is blue. Thu
s every object will cast some of its own colour backin the light that it reflects.
Now it is not only these books or papers that reflect light to yourhand: every object in the room, on that side of it, reflects some, butmore feebly, and the colours mixing all together form a neutral[209]light, which lets the colour of your hand itself be more distinctly seenthan that of any object which reflects light to it; but if there were noreflected light, that side of your hand would look as black as a coal.
Objects are seen, therefore in general, partly by direct light, andpartly by light reflected from the objects around them, or from theatmosphere and clouds. The colour of their light sides depends much onthat of the direct light, and that of the dark sides on the colours ofthe objects near them. It is therefore impossible to say beforehandwhat colour an object will have at any point of its surface, that colourdepending partly on its own tint, and partly on infinite combinations ofrays reflected from other things. The only certain fact about dark sidesis, that their colour will be changeful, and that a picture which givesthem merely darker shades of the colour of the light sides mustassuredly be bad.
Now, lay your hand flat on the white paper you are drawing on. You willsee one side of each finger lighted, one side dark, and the shadow ofyour hand on the paper. Here, therefore, are the three divisions ofshade seen at once. And although the paper is white, and your hand of arosy colour somewhat darker than white, yet you will see that the shadowall along, just under the finger which casts it, is darker than theflesh, and is of a very deep grey. The reason of this is, that muchlight is reflected from the paper to the dark side of your finger, butvery little is reflected from other things to the paper itself in thatchink under your finger.
In general, for this reason, a shadow, or, at any rate, the part of theshadow nearest the object, is darker than the dark side of the object. Isay in general, because a thousand accidents may interfere to preventits being so. Take a little bit of glass, as a wine-glass, or theink-bottle, and play it about a little on the side of your hand farthestfrom the window; you will presently find you are throwing gleams oflight all over the dark side of your hand, and in some positions of theglass the reflection from it will annihilate the shadow altogether, andyou will see your hand dark on the white paper. Now a stupid painterwould represent, for instance, a drinking-glass beside the hand of oneof his figures, and because he had been taught by rule that "shadow wasdarker than the dark side," he would never think of the reflection fromthe glass, but paint a dark grey under the hand, just as if no glasswere there. But a great painter would be sure to think of the trueeffect, and paint it; and then comes the stupid critic, and wonders whythe hand is so light on its dark side.
Thus it is always dangerous to assert anything as a _rule_ in matters ofart; yet it is useful for you to remember that, in a general way, ashadow is darker than the dark side of the thing that casts it,supposing the colours otherwise the same; that is to say, when a whiteobject casts a shadow on a white surface, or a dark object on a darksurface: the rule will not hold if the colours are different, the shadowof a black object on a white surface being, of course, not so dark,usually, as the black thing casting it. The only way to ascertain theultimate truth in such matters is to _look_ for it; but, in themeantime, you will be helped by noticing that the cracks in the stoneare little ravines, on one side of which the light strikes sharply,while the other is in shade. This dark side usually casts a littledarker shadow at the bottom of the crack; and the general tone of thestone surface is not so bright as the light bank of the ravine. And,therefore, if you get the surface of the object of a uniform tint, moreor less indicative of shade, and then scratch out a white spot or streakin it of any shape; by putting a dark touch beside this white one, youmay turn it, as you choose, into either a ridge or an incision, intoeither a boss or a cavity. If you put the dark touch on the side of itnearest the sun, or rather, nearest the place that the light comes from,you will make it a cut or cavity; if you put it on the opposite side,you will make it a ridge or mound: and the complete success of theeffect depends less on depth of shade than on the rightness of thedrawing; that is to say, on the evident correspondence of the form ofthe shadow with the form that casts it. In drawing rocks, or wood, oranything irregularly shaped, you will gain far more by a little patiencein following the forms carefully, though with slight touches, than bylaboured finishing of textures of surface and transparencies of shadow.
When you have got the whole well into shape, proceed to lay on thestains and spots with great care, quite as much as you gave to theforms. Very often, spots or bars of local colour do more to express formthan even the light and shade, and they are always interesting as themeans by which Nature carries light into her shadows, and shade into herlights, an art of which we shall have more to say hereafter, in speakingof composition. Fig. 5. is a rough sketch of a fossil sea-urchin, inwhich the projections of the shell are of black flint, coming through achalky surface. These projections form dark spots in the light; andtheir sides, rising out of the shadow, form smaller whitish spots in thedark. You may take such scattered lights as these out with the penknife,provided you are just as careful to place them rightly, as if you gotthem by a more laborious process.
When you have once got the feeling of the way in which gradationexpresses roundness and projection, you may try your strength onanything natural or artificial that happens to take your fancy, providedit be not too complicated in form. I have asked you to draw a stonefirst, because any irregularities and failures in your shading will beless offensive to you, as being partly characteristic of the rough stonesurface, than they would be in a more delicate subject; and you may aswell go on drawing rounded stones of different shapes for a littlewhile, till you find you can really shade delicately. You may then takeup folds of thick white drapery, a napkin or towel thrown carelessly onthe table is as good as anything, and try to express them in the sameway; only now you will find that your shades must be wrought withperfect unity and tenderness, or you will lose the flow of the folds.Always remember that a little bit perfected is worth more than manyscrawls; whenever you feel yourself inclined to scrawl, give up workresolutely, and do not go back to it till next day. Of course your towelor napkin must be put on something that may be locked up, so that itsfolds shall not be disturbed till you have finished. If you find thatthe folds will not look right, get a photograph of a piece of drapery(there are plenty now to be bought, taken from the sculpture of thecathedrals of Rheims, Amiens, and Chartres, which will at once educateyour hand and your taste), and copy some piece of that; you will thenascertain what it is that is wanting in your studies from nature,whether more gradation, or greater watchfulness of the disposition ofthe folds. Probably for some time you will find yourself failingpainfully in both, for drapery is very difficult to follow in itssweeps; but do not lose courage, for the greater the difficulty, thegreater the gain in the effort. If your eye is more just in measurementof form than delicate in perception of tint, a pattern on the foldedsurface will help you. Try whether it does or not; and if the patterneddrapery confuses you, keep for a time to the simple white one; but if ithelps you, continue to choose patterned stuffs (tartans, and simplechequered designs are better at first than flowered ones), and eventhough it should confuse you, begin pretty soon to use a patternoccasionally, copying all the distortions and perspective modificationsof it among the folds with scrupulous care.
Neither must you suppose yourself condescending in doing this. Thegreatest masters are always fond of drawing patterns; and the greaterthey are, the more pains they take to do it truly.[210] Nor can there bebetter practice at any time, as introductory to the nobler complicationof natural detail. For when you can draw the spots which follow thefolds of a printed stuff, you will have some chance of following thespots which fall into the folds of the skin of a leopard as he leaps;but if you cannot draw the manufacture, assuredly you will never be ableto draw the creature. So the cloudings on a piece of wood, carefullydrawn, will be the best introduction to the drawing
of the clouds of thesky, or the waves of the sea; and the dead leaf-patterns on a damaskdrapery, well rendered, will enable you to disentangle masterfully theliving leaf-patterns of a thorn thicket, or a violet bank.
Observe, however, in drawing any stuffs, or bindings of books, or otherfinely textured substances, do not trouble yourself, as yet, much aboutthe woolliness or gauziness of the thing; but get it right in shade andfold, and true in pattern. We shall see, in the course ofafter-practice, how the penned lines may be made indicative of texture;but at present attend only to the light, and shade, and pattern. Youwill be puzzled at first by _lustrous_ surfaces, but a little attentionwill show you that the expression of these depends merely on the rightdrawing of their light, and shade, and reflections. Put a small blackjapanned tray on the table in front of some books; and you will see itreflects the objects beyond it as in a little black rippled pond; itsown colour mingling always with that of the reflected objects. Drawthese reflections of the books properly, making them dark and distorted,as you will see that they are, and you will find that this gives thelustre to your tray. It is not well, however, to draw polished objectsin general practice; only you should do one or two in order tounderstand the aspect of any lustrous portion of other things, such asyou cannot avoid; the gold, for instance, on the edges of books, or theshining of silk and damask, in which lies a great part of the expressionof their folds. Observe, also, that there are very few things which aretotally without lustre: you will frequently find a light which puzzlesyou, on some apparently dull surface, to be the dim image of anotherobject.
And now, as soon as you can conscientiously assure me that with thepoint of the pen or pencil you can lay on any form and shade you like, Igive you leave to use the brush with one colour,--sepia, or blue-black,or mixed cobalt and blue-black, or neutral tint; and this will muchfacilitate your study, and refresh you. But, preliminarily, you must doone or two more exercises in tinting.
EXERCISE IX.
Prepare your colour as before directed. Take a brush full of it, andstrike it on the paper in any irregular shape; as the brush gets drysweep the surface of the paper with it as if you were dusting the papervery lightly; every such sweep of the brush will leave a number of moreor less minute interstices in the colour. The lighter and faster everydash the better. Then leave the whole to dry, and as soon as it is dry,with little colour in your brush, so that you can bring it to a finepoint, fill up all the little interstices one by one, so as to make thewhole as even as you can, and fill in the larger gaps with more colour,always trying to let the edges of the first and of the newly appliedcolour exactly meet, and not lap over each other. When your new colourdries, you will find it in places a little paler than the first. Retouchit, therefore, trying to get the whole to look quite one piece. A verysmall bit of colour thus filled up with your very best care, and broughtto look as if it had been quite even from the first, will give youbetter practice and more skill than a great deal filled in carelessly;so do it with your best patience, not leaving the most minute spot ofwhite; and do not fill in the large pieces first and then go to thesmall, but quietly and steadily cover in the whole up to a marked limit;then advance a little farther, and so on; thus always seeing distinctlywhat is done and what undone.
EXERCISE X.
Lay a coat of the blue, prepared as usual, over a whole square of paper.Let it dry. Then another coat over four-fifths of the square, orthereabouts, leaving the edge rather irregular than straight, and let itdry. Then another coat over three-fifths; another over two-fifths; andthe last over one-fifth; so that the square may present the appearanceof gradual increase in darkness in five bands, each darker than the onebeyond it. Then, with the brush rather dry (as in the former exercise,when filling up the interstices), try, with small touches, like thoseused in the pen etching, only a little broader, to add shade delicatelybeyond each edge, so as to lead the darker tints into the paler onesimperceptibly. By touching the paper very lightly, and putting amultitude of little touches, crossing and recrossing in every direction,you will gradually be able to work up to the darker tints, outside ofeach, so as quite to efface their edges, and unite them tenderly withthe next tint. The whole square, when done, should look evenly shadedfrom dark to pale, with no bars; only a crossing texture of touches,something like chopped straw, over the whole.[211]
Next, take your rounded pebble; arrange it in any light and shade youlike; outline it very loosely with the pencil. Put on a wash of colour,prepared _very_ pale, quite flat over all of it, except the highestlight, leaving the edge of your colour quite sharp. Then another wash,extending only over the darker parts, leaving the edge of that sharpalso, as in tinting the square. Then another wash over the still darkerparts, and another over the darkest, leaving each edge to dry sharp.Then, with the small touches, efface the edges, reinforce the darks, andwork the whole delicately together, as you would with the pen, till youhave got it to the likeness of the true light and shade. You will findthat the tint underneath is a great help, and that you can now geteffects much more subtle and complete than with the pen merely.
The use of leaving the edges always sharp is that you may not trouble orvex the colour, but let it lie as it falls suddenly on the paper; colourlooks much more lovely when it has been laid on with a dash of thebrush, and left to dry in its own way, than when it has been draggedabout and disturbed; so that it is always better to let the edges andforms be a _little_ wrong, even if one cannot correct them afterwards,than to lose this fresh quality of the tint. Very great masters inwater-colour can lay on the true forms at once with a dash, and _bad_masters in water-colour lay on grossly false forms with a dash, andleave them false; for people in general, not knowing false from true,are as much pleased with the appearance of power in the irregular blotas with the presence of power in the determined one; but _we_, in ourbeginnings, must do as much as we can with the broad dash, and thencorrect with the point, till we are quite right. We must take care to beright, at whatever cost of pains; and then gradually we shall find wecan be right with freedom.
I have hitherto limited you to colour mixed with two or threeteaspoonfuls of water; but in finishing your light and shade from thestone, you may, as you efface the edge of the palest coat towards thelight, use the colour for the small touches with more and more water,till it is so pale as not to be perceptible. Thus you may obtain a_perfect_ gradation to the light. And in reinforcing the darks, whenthey are very dark, you may use less and less water. If you take thecolour tolerably dark on your brush, only always liquid (not pasty), anddash away the superfluous colour on blotting-paper, you will find that,touching the paper very lightly with the dry brush, you can, by repeatedtouches, produce a dusty kind of bloom, very valuable in giving depth toshadow; but it requires great patience and delicacy of hand to do thisproperly. You will find much of this kind of work in the grounds andshadows of William Hunt's drawings.[212]
As you get used to the brush and colour, you will gradually find outtheir ways for yourself, and get the management of them. Nothing butpractice will do this perfectly; but you will often save yourself muchdiscouragement by remembering what I have so often asserted,--that ifanything goes wrong, it is nearly sure to be refinement that is wanting,not force; and connexion, not alteration. If you dislike the state yourdrawing is in, do not lose patience with it, nor dash at it, nor alterits plan, nor rub it desperately out, at the place you think wrong; butlook if there are no shadows you can gradate more perfectly; no littlegaps and rents you can fill; no forms you can more delicately define:and do not _rush_ at any of the errors or incompletions thus discerned,but efface or supply slowly, and you will soon find your drawing takeanother look. A very useful expedient in producing some effects, is towet the paper, and then lay the colour on it, more or less wet,according to the effect you want. You will soon see how prettily itgradates itself as it dries; when dry, you can reinforce it withdelicate stippling when you want it darker. Also, while the colour isstill damp on the paper, by drying your brush thoroughly, and touchingthe
colour with the brush so dried, you may take out soft lights withgreat tenderness and precision. Try all sorts of experiments of thiskind, noticing how the colour behaves; but remembering always that yourfinal results must be obtained, and can only be obtained, by pure workwith the point, as much as in the pen drawing.
You will find also, as you deal with more and more complicated subjects,that Nature's resources in light and shade are so much richer thanyours, that you cannot possibly get all, or anything _like_ all, thegradations of shadow in any given group. When this is the case,determine first to keep the broad masses of things distinct: if, forinstance, there is a green book, and a white piece of paper, and a blackinkstand in the group, be sure to keep the white paper as a light mass,the green book as a middle tint mass, the black inkstand as a dark mass;and do not shade the folds in the paper, or corners of the book, so asto equal in depth the darkness of the inkstand. The great differencebetween the masters of light and shade, and imperfect artists, is thepower of the former to draw so delicately as to express form in adark-coloured object with little light, and in a light-coloured objectwith little darkness; and it is better even to leave the forms here andthere unsatisfactorily rendered than to lose the general relations ofthe great masses. And this observe, not because masses are grand ordesirable things in your composition (for with composition at presentyou have nothing whatever to do), but because it is a _fact_ that thingsdo so present themselves to the eyes of men, and that we see paper,book, and inkstand as three separate things, before we see the wrinkles,or chinks, or corners of any of the three. Understand, therefore, atonce, that no detail can be as strongly expressed in drawing as it is inthe reality; and strive to keep all your shadows and marks and minormarkings on the masses, lighter than they appear to be in Nature, youare sure otherwise to get them too dark. You will in doing this findthat you cannot get the _projection_ of things sufficiently shown; butnever mind that; there is no need that they should appear to project,but great need that their relations of shade to each other should bepreserved. All deceptive projection is obtained by partial exaggerationof shadow; and whenever you see it, you may be sure the drawing is moreor less bad; a thoroughly fine drawing or painting will always show aslight tendency towards _flatness_.
Observe, on the other hand, that however white an object may be, thereis always some small point of it whiter than the rest. You musttherefore have a slight tone of grey over everything in your pictureexcept on the extreme high lights; even the piece of white paper, inyour subject, must be toned slightly down, unless (and there are athousand chances to one against its being so) it should all be turned soas fully to front the light. By examining the treatment of the whiteobjects in any pictures accessible to you by Paul Veronese or Titian,you will soon understand this.[213]
As soon as you feel yourself capable of expressing with the brush theundulations of surfaces and the relations of masses, you may proceed todraw more complicated and beautiful things.[214] And first, the boughsof trees, now not in mere dark relief, but in full rounding. Take thefirst bit of branch or stump that comes to hand, with a fork in it; cutoff the ends of the forking branches, so as to leave the whole onlyabout a foot in length; get a piece of paper the same size, fix your bitof branch in some place where its position will not be altered, and drawit thoroughly, in all its light and shade, full size; striving, aboveall things, to get an accurate expression of its structure at the forkof the branch. When once you have mastered the tree at its _armpits_,you will have little more trouble with it.
Always draw whatever the background happens to be, exactly as you seeit. Wherever you have fastened the bough, you must draw whatever isbehind it, ugly or not, else you will never know whether the light andshade are right; they may appear quite wrong to you, only for want ofthe background. And this general law is to be observed in all yourstudies: whatever you draw, draw completely and unalteringly, else younever know if what you have done is right, or whether you _could_ havedone it rightly had you tried. There is nothing _visible_ out of whichyou may not get useful practice.
Next, to put the leaves on your boughs. Gather a small twig with four orfive leaves on it, put it into water, put a sheet of light-coloured orwhite paper behind it, so that all the leaves may be relieved in darkfrom the white field; then sketch in their dark shape carefully withpencil as you did the complicated boughs, in order to be sure that alltheir masses and interstices are right in shape before you beginshading, and complete as far as you can with pen and ink, in the mannerof Fig. 6., which is a young shoot of lilac.
FIG. 6.]
You will probably, in spite of all your pattern drawings, be at firstpuzzled by leaf foreshortening; especially because the look ofretirement or projection depends not so much on the perspective of theleaves themselves as on the double sight of the two eyes. Now there arecertain artifices by which good painters can partly conquer thisdifficulty; as slight exaggerations of force or colour in the nearerparts, and of obscurity in the more distant ones; but you must notattempt anything of this kind. When you are first sketching the leaves,shut one of your eyes, fix a point in the background, to bring the pointof one of the leaves against, and so sketch the whole bough as you seeit in a fixed position, looking with one eye only. Your drawing nevercan be made to look like the object itself, as you see that object with_both_ eyes,[215] but it can be made perfectly like the object seen withone, and you must be content when you have got a resemblance on theseterms.
In order to get clearly at the notion of the thing to be done, take asingle long leaf, hold it with its point towards you, and as flat as youcan, so as to see nothing of it but its thinness, as if you wanted toknow how thin it was; outline it so. Then slope it down graduallytowards you, and watch it as it lengthens out to its full length, heldperpendicularly down before you. Draw it in three or four differentpositions between these extremes, with its ribs as they appear in eachposition, and you will soon find out how it must be.
Draw first only two or three of the leaves; then larger clusters; andpractise, in this way, more and more complicated pieces of bough andleafage, till you find you can master the most difficult arrangements,not consisting of more than ten or twelve leaves. You will find as youdo this, if you have an opportunity of visiting any gallery of pictures,that you take a much more lively interest than before in the work of thegreat masters; you will see that very often their best backgrounds arecomposed of little more than a few sprays of leafage, carefully studied,brought against the distant sky; and that another wreath or two form thechief interest of their foregrounds. If you live in London you may testyour progress _accurately_ by the degree of admiration you feel for theleaves of vine round the head of the Bacchus, in Titian's Bacchus andAriadne. All this, however, will not enable you to draw a mass offoliage. You will find, on looking at any rich piece of vegetation, thatit is only one or two of the nearer clusters that you can by anypossibility draw in this complete manner. The mass is too vast, and toointricate, to be thus dealt with.
FIG. 7. a b c]
You must now therefore have recourse to some confused mode of execution,capable of expressing the confusion of Nature. And, first, you mustunderstand what the character of that confusion is. If you lookcarefully at the outer sprays of any tree at twenty or thirty yards'distance, you will see them defined against the sky in masses, which, atfirst, look quite definite; but if you examine them, you will see,mingled with the real shapes of leaves, many indistinct lines, whichare, some of them, stalks of leaves, and some, leaves seen with the edgeturned towards you, and coming into sight in a broken way; for,supposing the real leaf shape to be as at _a_, Fig. 7., this, whenremoved some yards from the eye, will appear dark against the sky, as at_b_; then, when removed some yards farther still, the stalk and pointdisappear altogether, the middle of the leaf becomes little more than aline; and the result is the condition at _c_, only with this farthersubtlety in the look of it, inexpressible in the woodcut, that the stalkand point of the leaf, though they have disappeared to the eye, have yet
some influence in _checking the light_ at the places where they exist,and cause a slight dimness about the part of the leaf which remainsvisible, so that its perfect effect could only be rendered by two layersof colour, one subduing the sky tone a little, the next drawing thebroken portions of the leaf, as at _c_, and carefully indicating thegreater darkness of the spot in the middle, where the under side of theleaf is.
This is the perfect theory of the matter. In practice we cannot reachsuch accuracy; but we shall be able to render the general look of thefoliage satisfactorily by the following mode of practice.
Gather a spray of any tree, about a foot or eighteen inches long. Fix itfirmly by the stem in anything that will support it steadily; put itabout eight feet away from you, or ten if you are far-sighted. Put asheet of not very white paper behind it, as usual. Then draw verycarefully, first placing them with pencil, and then filling them up withink, every leaf, mass and stalk of it in simple black profile, as yousee them against the paper: Fig. 8. is a bough of Phillyrea so drawn. Donot be afraid of running the leaves into a black mass when they cometogether; this exercise is only to teach you what the actual shapes ofsuch masses are when seen against the sky.
FIG. 8.]
Make two careful studies of this kind of one bough of every commontree--oak, ash, elm, birch, beech, &c.; in fact, if you are good, andindustrious, you will make one such study carefully at least three timesa week, until you have examples of every sort of tree and shrub you canget branches of. You are to make two studies of each bough, for thisreason--all masses of foliage have an upper and under surface, and theside view of them, or profile, shows a wholly different organisation ofbranches from that seen in the view from above. They are generally seenmore or less in profile, as you look at the whole tree, and Nature putsher best composition into the profile arrangement. But the view fromabove or below occurs not unfrequently, also, and it is quite necessaryyou should draw it if you wish to understand the anatomy of the tree.The difference between the two views is often far greater than you couldeasily conceive. For instance, in Fig. 9., _a_ is the upper view, and_b_ the profile, of a single spray of Phillyrea. Fig. 8. is anintermediate view of a larger bough; seen from beneath, but at somelateral distance also.
FIG. 9.]
When you have done a few branches in this manner, take one of the_drawings_, and put it first a yard away from you, then a yard and ahalf, then two yards; observe how the thinner stalks and leavesgradually disappear, leaving only a vague and slight darkness where theywere, and make another study of the effect at each distance, taking careto draw nothing more than you really see, for in this consists all thedifference between what would be merely a _miniature_ drawing of theleaves seen _near_, and a _full-size_ drawing of the same leaves at adistance. By full size, I mean the size which they would really appearof if their outline were traced through a pane of glass held at thesame distance from the eye at which you mean to hold your drawing. Youcan always ascertain this full size of any object by holding your paperupright before you, at the distance from your eye at which you wish yourdrawing to be seen. Bring its edge across the object you have to draw,and mark upon this edge the points where the outline of the objectcrosses, or goes behind, the edge of the paper. You will always find it,thus measured, smaller than you supposed.
When you have made a few careful experiments of this kind on your owndrawings, (which are better for practice, at first, than the real trees,because the black profile in the drawing is quite stable, and does notshake, and is not confused by sparkles of lustre on the leaves,) you maytry the extremities of the real trees, only not doing much at a time,for the brightness of the sky will dazzle and perplex your sight. Andthis brightness causes, I believe, some loss of the outline itself; atleast the chemical action of the light in a photograph extends muchwithin the edges of the leaves, and, as it were, eats them away so thatno tree extremity, stand it ever so still, nor any other form comingagainst bright sky, is truly drawn by a photograph; and if you oncesucceed in drawing a few sprays rightly, you will find the result muchmore lovely and interesting than any photograph can be.
All this difficulty, however, attaches to the rendering merely the darkform of the sprays as they come against the sky. Within those sprays,and in the heart of the tree, there is a complexity of a much moreembarrassing kind; for nearly all leaves have some lustre, and _all_ aremore or less translucent (letting light through them); therefore, in anygiven leaf, besides the intricacies of its own proper shadows andforeshortenings, there are three series of circumstances which alter orhide its forms. First, shadows cast on it by other leaves--often veryforcibly. Secondly, light reflected from its lustrous surface, sometimesthe blue of the sky, sometimes the white of clouds, or the sun itselfflashing like a star. Thirdly, forms and shadows of other leaves, seenas darkness _through_ the translucent parts of the leaf; a mostimportant element of foliage effect, but wholly neglected by landscapeartists in general.
The consequence of all this is, that except now and then by chance, theform of a complete leaf is never seen; but a marvellous and quaintconfusion, very definite, indeed, in its evidence of direction ofgrowth, and unity of action, but wholly indefinable and inextricable,part by part, by any amount of patience. You cannot possibly work it outin fac simile, though you took a twelvemonth's time to a tree; and youmust therefore try to discover some mode of execution which will more orless imitate, by its own variety and mystery, the variety and mystery ofNature, without absolute delineation of detail.
Now I have led you to this conclusion by observation of tree form only,because in that the thing to be proved is clearest. But no naturalobject exists which does not involve in some part or parts of it thisinimitableness, this mystery of quantity, which needs peculiarity ofhandling and trick of touch to express it completely. If leaves areintricate, so is moss, so is foam, so is rock cleavage, so are fur andhair, and texture of drapery, and of clouds. And although methods anddexterities of handling are wholly useless if you have not gained firstthe thorough knowledge of the form of the thing; so that if you cannotdraw a branch perfectly, then much less a tree; and if not a wreath ofmist perfectly, much less a flock of clouds; and if not a single grassblade perfectly, much less a grass bank; yet having once got this powerover decisive form, you may safely--and must, in order to perfection ofwork--carry out your knowledge by every aid of method and dexterity ofhand.
But, in order to find out what method can do, you must now look at Artas well as at Nature, and see what means painters and engravers haveactually employed for the expression of these subtleties. Whereuponarises the question, what opportunity have you to obtain engravings? Youought, if it is at all in your power, to possess yourself of a certainnumber of good examples of Turner's engraved works: if this be not inyour power, you must just make the best use you can of the shopwindows, or of any plates of which you can obtain a loan. Very possibly,the difficulty of getting sight of them may stimulate you to put them tobetter use. But, supposing your means admit of your doing so, possessyourself, first, of the illustrated edition either of Rogers's Italy orRogers's Poems, and then of about a dozen of the plates named in theannexed lists. The prefixed letters indicate the particular pointsdeserving your study in each engraving.[216] Be sure, therefore, thatyour selection includes, at all events, one plate marked with eachletter--of course the plates marked with two or three letters are, forthe most part, the best. Do not get more than twelve of these plates,nor even all the twelve at first. For the more engravings you have, theless attention you will pay to them. It is a general truth, that theenjoyment derivable from art cannot be increased in quantity, beyond acertain point, by quantity of possession; it is only spread, as it were,over a larger surface, and very often dulled by finding ideas repeatedin different works. Now, for a beginner, it is always better that hisattention should be concentrated on one or two good things, and all hisenjoyment founded on them, than that he should look at many, withdivided thoughts. He has much to discover; and his best way ofdiscovering it is to thin
k long over few things, and watch themearnestly. It is one of the worst errors of this age to try to know andto see too much: the men who seem to know everything, never in realityknow anything rightly. Beware of _hand-book_ knowledge.
These engravings are, in general, more for you to look at than to copy;and they will be of more use to you when we come to talk of composition,than they are at present; still, it will do you a great deal of good,sometimes to try how far you can get their delicate texture, orgradations of tone; as your pen-and-ink drawing will be apt to inclinetoo much to a scratchy and broken kind of shade. For instance, thetexture of the white convent wall, and the drawing of its tiled roof, inthe vignette at p. 227. of Rogers's Poems, is as exquisite as work canpossibly be; and it will be a great and profitable achievement if youcan at all approach it. In like manner, if you can at all imitate thedark distant country at p. 7., or the sky at p. 80., of the same volume,or the foliage at pp. 12. and 144., it will be good gain; and if you canonce draw the rolling clouds and running river at p. 9. of the "Italy,"or the city in the vignette of Aosta at p. 25., or the moonlight at p.223., you will find that even Nature herself cannot afterwards veryterribly puzzle you with her torrents, or towers, or moonlight.
You need not copy touch for touch, but try to get the same effect. Andif you feel discouraged by the delicacy required, and begin to thinkthat engraving is not drawing, and that copying it cannot help you todraw, remember that it differs from common drawing only by thedifficulties it has to encounter. You perhaps have got into a carelesshabit of thinking that engraving is a mere _business_, easy enough whenone has got into the knack of it. On the contrary, it is a form ofdrawing more difficult than common drawing, by exactly so much as it ismore difficult to cut steel than to move the pencil over paper. It istrue that there are certain mechanical aids and methods which reduce itat certain stages either to pure machine work, or to more or less ahabit of hand and arm; but this is not so in the foliage you are tryingto copy, of which the best and prettiest parts are always etched--thatis, drawn with a fine steel point and free hand: only the line made iswhite instead of black, which renders it much more difficult to judge ofwhat you are about. And the trying to copy these plates will be good foryou, because it will awaken you to the real labour and skill of theengraver, and make you understand a little how people must work, inthis world, who have really to _do_ anything in it.
Do not, however, suppose that I give you the engraving as a model--farfrom it; but it is necessary you should be able to do as well[217]before you think of doing better, and you will find many little helpsand hints in the various work of it. Only remember that _all_ engravers'foregrounds are bad; whenever you see the peculiar wriggling parallellines of modern engravings become distinct, you must not copy; noradmire: it is only the softer masses, and distances; and portions of thefoliage in the plates marked _f_, which you may copy. The best for thispurpose, if you can get it, is the "Chain bridge over the Tees," of theEngland series; the thicket on the right is very beautiful andinstructive, and very like Turner. The foliage in the "Ludlow" and"Powis" is also remarkably good.
Besides these line engravings, and to protect you from what harm thereis in their influence, you are to provide yourself, if possible, with aRembrandt etching, or a photograph of one (of figures, not landscape).It does not matter of what subject, or whether a sketchy or finishedone, but the sketchy ones are generally cheapest, and will teach youmost. Copy it as well as you can, noticing especially that Rembrandt'smost rapid lines have steady purpose; and that they are laid with almostinconceivable precision when the object becomes at all interesting. The"Prodigal Son," "Death of the Virgin," "Abraham and Isaac," and suchothers, containing incident and character rather than chiaroscuro, willbe the most instructive. You can buy one; copy it well; then exchangeit, at little loss, for another; and so, gradually, obtain a goodknowledge of his system. Whenever you have an opportunity of examininghis work at museums, &c., do so with the greatest care, not looking at_many_ things, but a long time at each. You must also provide yourself,if possible, with an engraving of Albert Durer's. This you will not beable to copy; but you must keep it beside you, and refer to it as astandard of precision in line. If you can get one with a _wing_ in it,it will be best. The crest with the cock, that with the skull and satyr,and the "Melancholy," are the best you could have, but any will do.Perfection in chiaroscuro drawing lies between these two masters,Rembrandt and Durer. Rembrandt is often too loose and vague; and Durerhas little or no effect of mist or uncertainty. If you can see anywherea drawing by Leonardo, you will find it balanced between the twocharacters; but there are no engravings which present this perfection,and your style will be best formed, therefore, by alternate study ofRembrandt and Durer. Lean rather to Durer; it is better for amateurs toerr on the side of precision than on that of vagueness: and though, as Ihave just said, you cannot copy a Durer, yet try every now and then aquarter of an inch square or so, and see how much nearer you can come;you cannot possibly try to draw the leafly crown of the "Melancholia"too often.
If you cannot get either a Rembrandt or a Durer, you may still learnmuch by carefully studying any of George Cruikshank's etchings, orLeech's woodcuts in Punch, on the free side; with Alfred Rethel's andRichter's[218] on the severe side. But in so doing you will need tonotice the following points:
When either the material (as the copper or wood) or the time of anartist, does not permit him to make a perfect drawing,--that is to say,one in which no lines shall be prominently visible,--and he is reducedto show the black lines, either drawn by the pen, or on the wood, it isbetter to make these lines help, as far as may be, the expression oftexture and form. You will thus find many textures, as of cloth or grassor flesh, and many subtle effects of light, expressed by Leech withzigzag or crossed or curiously broken lines; and you will see thatAlfred Rethel and Richter constantly express the direction and roundingof surfaces by the direction of the lines which shade them. All thesevarious means of expression will be useful to you, as far as you canlearn them, provided you remember that they are merely a kind ofshorthand; telling certain facts, not in quite the _right_ way, but inthe only possible way under the conditions: and provided in any afteruse of such means, you never try to show your own dexterity; but only toget as much record of the object as you can in a given time; and thatyou continually make efforts to go beyond shorthand, and draw portionsof the objects rightly.
And touching this question of _direction_ of lines as indicating that ofsurface, observe these few points:
FIG. 10.]
If lines are to be distinctly shown, it is better that, so far as they_can_ indicate any thing by their direction, they should explain ratherthan oppose the general character of the object. Thus, in the piece ofwoodcut from Titian, Fig. 10., the lines are serviceable by expressing,not only the shade of the trunk, but partly also its roundness, and theflow of its grain. And Albert Durer, whose work was chiefly engraving,sets himself always thus to make his lines as _valuable_ as possible;telling much by them, both of shade and direction of surface: and if youwere always to be limited to engraving on copper (and did not want toexpress effects of mist or darkness, as well as delicate forms), AlbertDurer's way of work would be the best example for you. But, inasmuch asthe perfect way of drawing is by shade without lines, and the greatpainters always conceive their subject as complete, even when they aresketching it most rapidly, you will find that, when they are notlimited in means, they do not much trust to direction of line, but willoften scratch in the shade of a rounded surface with nearly straightlines, that is to say, with the easiest and quickest lines possible tothemselves. When the hand is free, the easiest line for it to draw isone inclining from the left upward to the right, or _vice versa_, fromthe right downwards to the left; and when done very quickly, the line ishooked a little at the end by the effort at return to the next. Hence,you will always find the pencil, chalk, or pen sketch of a _very_ greatmaster full of these kind of lines; and even if he draws carefully, youwill find him using sim
ple straight lines from left to right, when aninferior master will have used curved ones. Fig. 11. is a fair facsimileof part of a sketch of Raphael's, which exhibits these characters verydistinctly. Even the careful drawings of Leonardo da Vinci are shadedmost commonly with straight lines; and you may always assume it as apoint increasing the probability of a drawing being by a great master ifyou find rounded surfaces, such as those of cheeks or lips, shaded withstraight lines.
FIG. 11.]
But you will also now understand how easy it must be for dishonestdealers to forge or imitate scrawled sketches like Figure 11., and passthem for the work of great masters; and how the power of determining thegenuineness of a drawing depends entirely on your knowing the _facts_ ofthe object drawn, and perceiving whether the hasty handling is _all_conducive to the expression of those truths. In a great man's work, atits fastest, no line is thrown away, and it is not by the rapidity, butthe _economy_ of the execution that you know him to be great. Now tojudge of this economy, you must know exactly what he meant to do,otherwise you cannot of course discern how far he has done it; that is,you must know the beauty and nature of the thing he was drawing. Alljudgment of art thus finally founds itself on knowledge of Nature.
But farther observe, that this scrawled, or economic, or impetuousexecution is never _affectedly_ impetuous. If a great man is not in ahurry, he never pretends to be; if he has no eagerness in his heart, heputs none into his hand; if he thinks his effect would be better gotwith _two_ lines, he never, to show his dexterity, tries to do it withone. Be assured, therefore (and this is a matter of great importance),that you will never produce a great drawing by imitating the _execution_of a great master. Acquire his knowledge and share his feelings, and theeasy execution will fall from your hand as it did from his; but if youmerely scrawl because he scrawled, or blot because he blotted, you willnot only never advance in power, but every able draughtsman, and everyjudge whose opinion is worth having, will know you for a cheat, anddespise you accordingly.
Again, observe respecting the use of outline:
All merely outlined drawings are bad, for the simple reason, that anartist of any power can always do more, and tell more, by quitting hisoutlines occasionally, and scratching in a few lines for shade, than hecan by restricting himself to outline only. Hence the fact of his sorestricting himself, whatever may be the occasion, shows him to be a baddraughtsman, and not to know how to apply his power economically. Thishard law, however, bears only on drawings meant to remain in the statein which you see them; not on those which were meant to be proceededwith, or for some mechanical use. It is sometimes necessary to draw pureoutlines, as an incipient arrangement of a composition, to be filled upafterwards with colour, or to be pricked through and used as patterns ortracings; but if, with no such ultimate object, making the drawingwholly for its own sake, and meaning it to remain in the state he leavesit, an artist restricts himself to outline, he is a bad draughtsman, andhis work is bad. There is no exception to this law. A good artisthabitually sees masses, not edges, and can in every case make hisdrawing more expressive (with any given quantity of work) by rapid shadethan by contours; so that all good work whatever is more or less touchedwith shade, and more or less interrupted as outline.
FIG. 12.]
Hence, the published works of Retsch, and all the English imitations ofthem, and all outline engravings from pictures, are bad work, and onlyserve to corrupt the public taste, and of such outlines, the worst arethose which are darkened in some part of their course by way ofexpressing the dark side, as Flaxman's from Dante, and such others;because an outline can only be true so long as it accurately representsthe form of the given object with _one_ of its edges. Thus, the outline_a_ and the outline _b_, Fig. 12., are both _true_ outlines of a ball;because, however thick the line may be, whether we take the interior orexterior edge of it, that edge of it always draws a true circle. But _c_is a false outline of a ball, because either the inner or outer edge ofthe black line must be an untrue circle, else the line could not bethicker in one place than another. Hence all "force," as it is called,is gained by falsification of the contours; so that no artist whose eyeis true and fine could endure to look at it. It does indeed often happenthat a painter, sketching rapidly, and trying again and again for someline which he cannot quite strike, blackens or loads the first line bysetting others beside and across it; and then a careless observersupposes it has been thickened on purpose; or, sometimes also, at aplace where shade is afterwards to enclose the form, the painter willstrike a broad dash of this shade beside his outline at once, looking asif he meant to thicken the outline; whereas this broad line is only thefirst instalment of the future shadow, and the outline is really drawnwith its inner edge. And thus, far from good draughtsmen darkening thelines which turn away from the light, the _tendency_ with them is ratherto darken them towards the light, for it is there in general that shadewill ultimately enclose them. The best example of this treatment that Iknow is Raphael's sketch, in the Louvre, of the head of the angelpursuing Heliodorus, the one that shows part of the left eye; where thedark strong lines which terminate the nose and forehead towards thelight are opposed to tender and light ones behind the ear, and in otherplaces towards the shade. You will see in Fig. 11. the same principlevariously exemplified; the principal dark lines, in the head and draperyof the arms, being on the side turned to the light.
All these refinements and ultimate principles, however, do not affectyour drawing for the present. You must try to make your outlines as_equal_ as possible; and employ pure outline only for the two followingpurposes: either (1.) to steady your hand, as in Exercise II., for ifyou cannot draw the line itself, you will never be able to terminateyour shadow in the precise shape required, when the line is absent; or(2.) to give you shorthand memoranda of forms, when you are pressed fortime. Thus the forms of distant trees in groups are defined, for themost part, by the light edge of the rounded mass of the nearer one beingshown against the darker part of the rounded mass of a more distant one;and to draw this properly, nearly as much work is required to round eachtree as to round the stone in Fig. 5. Of course you cannot often gettime to do this; but if you mark the terminal line of each tree as isdone by Durer in Fig. 13., you will get a most useful memorandum oftheir arrangement, and a very interesting drawing. Only observe in doingthis, you must not, because the procedure is a quick one, hurry thatprocedure itself. You will find, on copying that bit of Durer, thatevery one of his lines is firm, deliberate, and accurately descriptiveas far as it goes. It means a bush of such a size and such a shape,definitely observed and set down; it contains a true "signalement" ofevery nut-tree, and apple-tree, and higher bit of hedge, all round thatvillage. If you have not time to draw thus carefully, do not draw atall--you are merely wasting your work and spoiling your taste. When youhave had four or five years' practice you may be able to make usefulmemoranda at a rapid rate, but not yet; except sometimes of light andshade, in a way of which I will tell you presently. And this use ofoutline, note farther, is wholly confined to objects which have _edges_or _limits_. You can outline line a tree or a stone, when it risesagainst another tree or stone; but you cannot outline folds in drapery,or waves in water; if these are to be expressed at all it must be bysome sort of shade, and therefore the rule that no good drawing canconsist throughout of pure outline remains absolute. You see, in thatwoodcut of Durer's, his reason for even limiting himself so much tooutline as he has, in those distant woods and plains, is that he mayleave them in bright light, to be thrown out still more by the dark skyand the dark village spire; and the scene becomes real and sunny only bythe addition of these shades.
FIG. 13.]
Understanding, then, thus much of the use of outline, we will go back toour question about tree drawing left unanswered at page 60.
FIG. 14.]
FIG. 15.]
We were, you remember, in pursuit of mystery among the leaves. Now, itis quite easy to obtain mystery and disorder, to any extent; but thedifficulty is to keep organ
isation in the midst of mystery. And you willnever succeed in doing this unless you lean always to the definite side,and allow yourself rarely to become quite vague, at least through allyour early practice. So, after your single groups of leaves, your firststep must be to conditions like Figs. 14. and 15., which are carefulfacsimiles of two portions of a beautiful woodcut of Durer's, the Flightinto Egypt. Copy these carefully,--never mind how little at a time, butthoroughly; then trace the Durer, and apply it to your drawing, and donot be content till the one fits the other, else your eye is not trueenough to carry you safely through meshes of real leaves. And in thecourse of doing this, you will find that not a line nor dot of Durer'scan be displaced without harm; that all add to the effect, and eitherexpress something, or illumine something, or relieve something. If,afterwards, you copy any of the pieces of modern tree drawing, of whichso many rich examples are given constantly in our cheap illustratedperiodicals (any of the Christmas numbers of last year's _IllustratedNews_ or _Times_ are full of them), you will see that, though good andforcible general effect is produced, the lines are thrown in bythousands without special intention, and might just as well go one wayas another, so only that there be enough of them to produce all togethera well-shaped effect of intricacy: and you will find that a littlecareless scratching about with your pen will bring you very near thesame result without an effort; but that no scratching of pen, nor anyfortunate chance, nor anything but downright skill and thought, willimitate so much as one leaf of Durer's. Yet there is considerableintricacy and glittering confusion in the interstices of those vineleaves of his, as well as of the grass.
FIG. 16.]
When you have got familiarised to this firm manner, you may draw fromNature as much as you like in the same way, and when you are tired ofthe intense care required for this, you may fall into a little more easymassing of the leaves, as in Fig. 10. p. 66. This is facsimiled from anengraving after Titian, but an engraving not quite first-rate in manner,the leaves being a little too formal; still, it is a good enough modelfor your times of rest; and when you cannot carry the thing even so faras this, you may sketch the forms of the masses, as in Fig. 16.,[219]taking care always to have thorough command over your hand; that is, notto let the mass take a free shape because your hand ran glibly over thepaper, but because in nature it has actually a free and noble shape, andyou have faithfully followed the same.
And now that we have come to questions of _noble_ shape, as well as trueshape, and that we are going to draw from nature at our pleasure, otherconsiderations enter into the business, which are by no means confinedto _first_ practice, but extend to all practice; these (as this letteris long enough, I should think, to satisfy even the most exacting ofcorrespondents) I will arrange in a second letter; praying you only toexcuse the tiresomeness of this first one--tiresomeness inseparable fromdirections touching the beginning of any art,--and to believe me, eventhough I am trying to set you to dull and hard work.
Very faithfully yours, J. RUSKIN.
FOOTNOTES:
[199] (N. B. This note is only for the satisfaction of incredulous orcurious readers. You may miss it if you are in a hurry, or are willingto take the statement in the text on trust.)
The perception of solid Form is entirely a matter of experience. We_see_ nothing but flat colours; and it is only by a series ofexperiments that we find out that a stain of black or grey indicates thedark side of a solid substance, or that a faint hue indicates that theobject in which it appears is far away. The whole technical power ofpainting depends on our recovery of what may be called the _innocence ofthe eye_; that is to say, a sort of childish perception of these flatstains of colour, merely as such, without consciousness of what theysignify, as a blind man would see them if suddenly gifted with sight.
For instance; when grass is lighted strongly by the sun in certaindirections, it is turned from green into a peculiar and somewhatdusty-looking yellow. If we had been born blind, and were suddenlyendowed with sight on a piece of grass thus lighted in some parts by thesun, it would appear to us that part of the grass was green, and part adusty yellow (very nearly of the colour of primroses); and, if therewere primroses near, we should think that the sunlighted grass wasanother mass of plants of the same sulphur-yellow colour. We should tryto gather some of them, and then find that the colour went away from thegrass when we stood between it and the sun, but not from the primroses;and by a series of experiments we should find out that the sun wasreally the cause of the colour in the one,--not in the other. We gothrough such processes of experiment unconsciously in childhood; andhaving once come to conclusions touching the signification of certaincolours, we always suppose that we _see_ what we only know, and havehardly any consciousness of the real aspect of the signs we have learnedto interpret. Very few people have any idea that sunlighted grass isyellow.
Now, a highly accomplished artist has always reduced himself as nearlyas possible to this condition of infantine sight. He sees the colours ofnature exactly as they are, and therefore perceives at once in thesunlighted grass the precise relation between the two colours that formits shade and light. To him it does not seem shade and light, but bluishgreen barred with gold.
Strive, therefore, first of all, to convince yourself of this great factabout sight. This, in your hand, which you know by experience and touchto be a book, is to your eye nothing but a patch of white, variouslygradated and spotted; this other thing near you, which by experience youknow to be a table, is to your eye only a patch of brown, variouslydarkened and veined; and so on: and the whole art of Painting consistsmerely in perceiving the shape and depth of these patches of colour, andputting patches of the same size, depth, and shape on canvas. The onlyobstacle to the success of painting is, that many of the real coloursare brighter and paler than it is possible to put on canvas: we must putdarker ones to represent them.
[200] Stale crumb of bread is better, if you are making a delicatedrawing, than India-rubber, for it disturbs the surface of the paperless: but it crumbles about the room and makes a mess; and, besides, youwaste the good bread, which is wrong; and your drawing will not for along while be worth the crumbs. So use India-rubber very lightly; or, ifheavily pressing it only, not passing it over the paper, and leave whatpencil marks that will not come away so, without minding them. In afinished drawing the uneffaced penciling is often serviceable, helpingthe general tone, and enabling you to take out little bright lights.
[201] What is usually so much sought after under the term "freedom" isthe character of the drawing of a great master in a hurry, whose hand isso thoroughly disciplined, that when pressed for time he can let it flyas it will, and it will not go far wrong. But the hand of a great masterat real _work_ is _never_ free: its swiftest dash is under perfectgovernment. Paul Veronese or Tintoret could pause within a hair'sbreadth of any appointed mark, in their fastest touches; and follow,within a hair's breadth, the previously intended curve. You must never,therefore, aim at freedom. It is not required of your drawing that itshould be free, but that it should be _right_: in time you will be ableto do right easily, and then your work will be free in the best sense;but there is no merit in doing _wrong_ easily.
These remarks, however, do not apply to the lines used in shading,which, it will be remembered, are to be made as _quickly_ as possible.The reason of this is, that the quicker a line is drawn, the lighter itis at the ends, and therefore the more easily joined with other lines,and concealed by them; the object in perfect shading being to concealthe lines as much as possible.
And observe, in this exercise, the object is more to get firmness ofhand than accuracy of eye for outline; for there are no outlines inNature, and the ordinary student is sure to draw them falsely if hedraws them at all. Do not, therefore, be discouraged if you findmistakes continue to occur in your outlines; be content at present ifyou find your hand gaining command over the curves.
[202] If you can get any pieces of _dead_ white porcelain, not glazed,they will be useful models.
[203] Artists
who glance at this book may be surprised at thispermission. My chief reason is, that I think it more necessary that thepupil's eye should be trained to accurate perception of the relations ofcurve and right lines, by having the latter absolutely true, than thathe should practice drawing straight lines. But also, I believe, though Iam not quite sure of this, that he never _ought_ to be able to draw astraight line. I do not believe a perfectly trained hand ever can draw aline without some curvature in it, or some variety of direction. Proutcould draw a straight line, but I do not believe Raphael could, norTintoret. A great draughtsman can, as far as I have observed, draw everyline _but_ a straight one.
[204] Or, if you feel able to do so, scratch them in with confused quicktouches, indicating the general shape of the cloud or mist of twigsround the main branches; but do not take much trouble about them.
[205] It is more difficult, at first, to get, in colour, a narrowgradation than an extended one; but the ultimate difficulty is, as withthe pen, to make the gradation go _far_.
[206] Of course, all the columns of colour are to be of equal length.
[207] The degree of darkness you can reach with the given colour isalways indicated by the colour of the solid cake in the box.
[208] The figure _a_, Fig. 5., is very dark, but this is to give anexample of all kinds of depth of tint, without repeated figures.
[209] Nearly neutral in ordinary circumstances, but yet with quitedifferent tones in its neutrality, according to the colours of thevarious reflected rays that compose it.
[210] If we had any business with the reasons of this, I might, perhaps,be able to show you some metaphysical ones for the enjoyment, by trulyartistical minds, of the changes wrought by light, and shade, andperspective in patterned surfaces; but this is at present not to thepoint; and all that you need to know is that the drawing of such thingsis good exercise, and moreover a kind of exercise which Titian,Veronese, Tintoret, Giorgione, and Turner, all enjoyed, and strove toexcel in.
[211] The use of acquiring this habit of execution is that you may beable, when you begin to colour, to let one hue be seen in minuteportions, gleaming between the touches of another.
[212] William Hunt, of the Old Water-colour Society.
[213] At Marlborough House, among the four principal examples ofTurner's later water-colour drawing, perhaps the most neglected is thatof fishing-boats and fish at sunset. It is one of his most wonderfulworks, though unfinished. If you examine the larger white fishing-boatsail, you will find it has a little spark of pure white in itsright-hand upper corner, about as large as a minute pin's head, and thatall the surface of the sail is gradated to that focus. Try to copy thissail once or twice, and you will begin to understand Turner's work.Similarly, the wing of the Cupid in Correggio's large picture in theNational Gallery is focussed to two little grains of white at the top ofit. The points of light on the white flower in the wreath round the headof the dancing child-faun, in Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne, exemplifythe same thing.
[214] I shall not henceforward _number_ the exercises recommended; asthey are distinguished only by increasing difficulty of subject, not bydifference of method.
[215] If you understand the principle of the stereoscope you will knowwhy; if not, it does not matter; trust me for the truth of thestatement, as I cannot explain the principle without diagrams and muchloss of time.
[216] If you can, get first the plates marked with a star. The lettersmean as follows:--
_a_ stands for architecture, including distant grouping of towns, cottages, &c. _c_ clouds, including mist and aerial effects. _f_ foliage. _g_ ground, including low hills, when not rocky. _l_ effects of light. _m_ mountains, or bold rocky ground. _p_ power of general arrangement and effect. _q_ quiet water. _r_ running or rough water; or rivers, even if calm, when their line of flow is beautifully marked.
_From the England Series._
_a c f r._ Arundel. _a f l._ Ashby de la Zouche. _a l q r._ Barnard Castle.* _f m r._ Bolton Abbey. _f g r._ Buckfastleigh.* _a l p._ Caernarvon. _c l q._ Castle Upnor. _a f l._ Colchester. _l q._ Cowes. _c f p._ Dartmouth Cove. _c l q._ Flint Castle.* _a f g l._ Knaresborough.* _m r._ High Force of Tees.* _a f q._ Trematon. _a f p._ Lancaster. _c l m r._ Lancaster Sands.* _a g f._ Launceston. _c f l r._ Leicester Abbey. _f r._ Ludlow. _a f l._ Margate. _a l q._ Orford. _c p._ Plymouth. _f._ Powis Castle. _l m q._ Prudhoe Castle. _f l m r._ Chain Bridge over Tees.* _m q._ Ulleswater. _f m._ Valle Crucis.
_From the Keepsake._
_m p q._ Arona. _m._ Drachenfells. _f l._ Marley.* _p._ St. Germain en Laye. _l p q._ Florence. _l m._ Ballyburgh Ness.*
_From the Bible Series._
_f m._ Mount Lebanon. _m._ Rock of Moses at Sinai. _a l m._ Jericho. _a c g._ Joppa. _c l p q._ Solomon's Pools.* _a l._ Santa Saba. _a l._ Pool of Bethesda.
_From Scott's Works._
_p r._ Melrose. _f r._ Dryburgh.* _c m._ Glencoe. _c m._ Loch Coriskin. _a l._ Caerlaverock.
_From the "Rivers of France."_
_a q._ Chateau of Amboise, with large bridge on right. _l p r._ Rouen, looking down the river, poplars on right.* _a l p._ Rouen, with cathedral and rainbow, avenue on the left. _a p._ Rouen Cathedral. _f p._ Pont de l'Arche. _f l p._ View on the Seine, with avenue. _a c p._ Bridge of Meulan. _c g p r._ Caudebec.*
[217] As _well_;--not as minutely: the diamond cuts finer lines on thesteel than you can draw on paper with your pen; but you must be able toget tones as even, and touches as firm.
[218] See, for account of these plates, the Appendix on "Works to bestudied."
[219] This sketch is not of a tree standing on its head, though it lookslike it. You will find it explained presently.