The Elements of Drawing Part 7

Pembury Mill.

If you cannot get one of these, any of the others will be serviceable, except only the twelve following, which are quite useless:--

1. Scene in Italy, with goats on a walled road, and trees above.

2. Interior of church.

3. Scene with bridge, and trees above; figures on left, one playing a pipe.

4. Scene with figure playing on tambourine.

5. Scene on Thames with high trees, and a square tower of a church seen through them.

6. Fifth Plague of Egypt.

7. Tenth Plague of Egypt.

8. Rivaulx Abbey.

9. Wye and Severn.

10. Scene with castle in center, cows under trees on the left.

11. Martello Towers.

12. Calm.

It is very unlikely that you should meet with one of the original etchings; if you should, it will be a drawing-master in itself alone, for it is not only equivalent to a pen-and-ink drawing by Turner, but to a very careful one; only observe, the Source of Arveron, Raglan, and Dumblane were not etched by Turner; and the etchings of those three are not good for separate study, though it is deeply interesting to see how Turner, apparently provoked at the failure of the beginnings in the Arveron and Raglan, took the plates up himself, and either conquered or brought into use the bad etching by his marvelous engraving. The Dumblane was, however, well etched by Mr. Lupton, and beautifully engraved by him. The finest Turner etching is of an aqueduct with a stork standing in a mountain stream, not in the published series; and next to it, are the unpublished etchings of the Via Mala and Crowhurst. Turner seems to have been so fond of these plates that he kept retouching and finishing them, and never made up his mind to let them go. The Via Mala is certainly, in the state in which Turner left it, the finest of the whole series: its etching is, as I said, the best after that of the aqueduct. Figure 20, above, is part of another fine unpublished etching, "Windsor, from Salt Hill." Of the published etchings, the finest are the Ben Arthur, aesacus, Cephalus, and Stone Pines, with the Girl washing at a Cistern; the three latter are the more generally instructive. Hindhead Hill, Isis, Jason, and Morpeth, are also very desirable.

[26] You will find more notice of this point in the account of Harding's tree-drawing, a little farther on.

[27] The impressions vary so much in color that no brown can be specified.

[28] You had better get such a photograph, even though you have a Liber print as well.

[29] See the closing letter in this volume.

[30] [In 1857.]

[31] If you are not acquainted with Harding's works, (an unlikely supposition, considering their popularity,) and cannot meet with the one in question, the diagrams given here will enable you to understand all that is needful for our purposes.

[32] I draw this figure (a young shoot of oak) in outline only, it being impossible to express the refinements of shade in distant foliage in a wood-cut.

[33] His lithographic sketches, those for instance in the Park and the Forest, and his various lessons on foliage, possess greater merit than the more ambitious engravings in his Principles and Practice of Art. There are many useful remarks, however, dispersed through this latter work.

[34] On this law you do well, if you can get access to it, to look at the fourth chapter of the fourth volume of Modern Painters.

[35] See Note 3 in Appendix I.

[36] The student may hardly at first believe that the perspective of buildings is of little consequence; but he will find it so ultimately. See the remarks on this point in the Preface.

[37] See Note 4 in Appendix I.

[38] See Note 5 in Appendix I.

[39] It is a useful piece of study to dissolve some Prussian blue in water, so as to make the liquid definitely blue: fill a large white basin with the solution, and put anything you like to float on it, or lie in it; walnut sh.e.l.ls, bits of wood, leaves of flowers, etc.

Then study the effects of the reflections, and of the stems of the flowers or submerged portions of the floating objects, as they appear through the blue liquid; noting especially how, as you lower your head and look along the surface, you see the reflections clearly; and how, as you raise your head, you lose the reflections, and see the submerged stems clearly.

[40] Respecting Architectural Drawing, see the notice of the works of Prout in the Appendix.

LETTER III.

ON COLOR AND COMPOSITION.

152. MY DEAR READER,--If you have been obedient, and have hitherto done all that I have told you, I trust it has not been without much subdued remonstrance, and some serious vexation. For I should be sorry if, when you were led by the course of your study to observe closely such things as are beautiful in color, you had not longed to paint them, and felt considerable difficulty in complying with your restriction to the use of black, or blue, or gray. You _ought_ to love color, and to think nothing quite beautiful or perfect without it; and if you really do love it, for its own sake, and are not merely desirous to color because you think painting a finer thing than drawing, there is some chance you may color well. Nevertheless, you need not hope ever to produce anything more than pleasant helps to memory, or useful and suggestive sketches in color, unless you mean to be wholly an artist. You may, in the time which other vocations leave at your disposal, produce finished, beautiful, and masterly drawings in light and shade. But to color well, requires your life. It cannot be done cheaper. The difficulty of doing right is increased--not twofold nor threefold, but a thousandfold, and more--by the addition of color to your work. For the chances are more than a thousand to one against your being right both in form and color with a given touch: it is difficult enough to be right in form, if you attend to that only; but when you have to attend, at the same moment, to a much more subtle thing than the form, the difficulty is strangely increased,--and multiplied almost to infinity by this great fact, that, while form is absolute, so that you can say at the moment you draw any line that it is either right or wrong, color is wholly _relative_. Every hue throughout your work is altered by every touch that you add in other places; so that what was warm a minute ago, becomes cold when you have put a hotter color in another place, and what was in harmony when you left it, becomes discordant as you set other colors beside it; so that every touch must be laid, not with a view to its effect at the time, but with a view to its effect in futurity, the result upon it of all that is afterwards to be done being previously considered. You may easily understand that, this being so, nothing but the devotion of life, and great genius besides, can make a colorist.

153. But though you cannot produce finished colored drawings of any value, you may give yourself much pleasure, and be of great use to other people, by occasionally sketching with a view to color only; and preserving distinct statements of certain color facts--as that the harvest moon at rising was of such and such a red, and surrounded by clouds of such and such a rosy gray; that the mountains at evening were in truth so deep in purple; and the waves by the boat's side were indeed of that incredible green. This only, observe, if you have an eye for color; but you may presume that you have this, if you enjoy color.

154. And, though of course you should always give as much form to your subject as your attention to its color will admit of, remember that the whole value of what you are about depends, in a colored sketch, on the color merely. If the color is wrong, everything is wrong: just as, if you are singing, and sing false notes, it does not matter how true the words are. If you sing at all, you must sing sweetly; and if you color at all, you must color rightly. Give up all the form, rather than the slightest part of the color: just as, if you felt yourself in danger of a false note, you would give up the word, and sing a meaningless sound, if you felt that so you could save the note. Never mind though your houses are all tumbling down,--though your clouds are mere blots, and your trees mere k.n.o.bs, and your sun and moon like crooked sixpences,--so only that trees, clouds, houses, and sun or moon, are of the right colors. Of course, the discipline you have gone through will enable you to hint something of form, even in the fastest sweep of the brush; but do not let the thought of form hamper you in the least, when you begin to make colored memoranda. If you want the form of the subject, draw it in black and white. If you want its color, take its color, and be sure you _have_ it, and not a spurious, treacherous, half-measured piece of mutual concession, with the colors all wrong, and the forms still anything but right. It is best to get into the habit of considering the colored work merely as supplementary to your other studies; making your careful drawings of the subject first, and then a colored memorandum separately, as shapeless as you like, but faithful in hue, and entirely minding its own business. This principle, however, bears chiefly on large and distant subjects: in foregrounds and near studies, the color cannot be had without a good deal of definition of form. For if you do not map the mosses on the stones accurately, you will not have the right quant.i.ty of color in each bit of moss pattern, and then none of the colors will look right; but it always simplifies the work much if you are clear as to your point of aim, and satisfied, when necessary, to fail of all but that.

155. Now, of course, if I were to enter into detail respecting coloring, which is the beginning and end of a painter's craft, I should need to make this a work in three volumes instead of three letters, and to ill.u.s.trate it in the costliest way. I only hope, at present, to set you pleasantly and profitably to work, leaving you, within the tethering of certain leading-strings, to gather what advantages you can from the works of art of which every year brings a greater number within your reach;--and from the instruction which, every year, our rising artists will be more ready to give kindly, and better able to give wisely.

156. And, first, of materials. Use hard cake colors, not moist colors: grind a sufficient quant.i.ty of each on your palette every morning, keeping a separate plate, large and deep, for colors to be used in broad washes, and wash both plate and palette every evening, so as to be able always to get good and pure color when you need it; and force yourself into cleanly and orderly habits about your colors. The two best colorists of modern times, Turner and Rossetti,[41] afford us, I am sorry to say, no confirmation of this precept by their practice. Turner was, and Rossetti is, as slovenly in all their procedures as men can well be; but the result of this was, with Turner, that the colors have altered in all his pictures, and in many of his drawings; and the result of it with Rossetti is, that though his colors are safe, he has sometimes to throw aside work that was half done, and begin over again.

William Hunt, of the Old Water-color, is very neat in his practice; so, I believe, is Mulready; so is John Lewis; and so are the leading Pre-Raphaelites, Rossetti only excepted. And there can be no doubt about the goodness of the advice, if it were only for this reason, that the more particular you are about your colors the more you will get into a deliberate and methodical habit in using them, and all true speed in coloring comes of this deliberation.

157. Use Chinese white, well ground, to mix with your colors in order to pale them, instead of a quant.i.ty of water. You will thus be able to shape your ma.s.ses more quietly, and play the colors about with more ease; they will not damp your paper so much, and you will be able to go on continually, and lay forms of pa.s.sing cloud and other fugitive or delicately shaped lights, otherwise unattainable except by time.

158. This mixing of white with the pigments, so as to render them opaque, const.i.tutes body-color drawing as opposed to transparent-color drawing, and you will, perhaps, have it often said to you that this body-color is "illegitimate." It is just as legitimate as oil-painting, being, so far as handling is concerned, the same process, only without its uncleanliness, its unwholesomeness, or its inconvenience; for oil will not dry quickly, nor carry safely, nor give the same effects of atmosphere without tenfold labor. And if you hear it said that the body-color looks chalky or opaque, and, as is very likely, think so yourself, be yet a.s.sured of this, that though certain effects of glow and transparencies of gloom are not to be reached without transparent color, those glows and glooms are _not_ the n.o.blest aim of art. After many years' study of the various results of fresco and oil painting in Italy, and of body-color and transparent color in England, I am now entirely convinced that the greatest things that are to be done in art must be done in dead color. The habit of depending on varnish or on lucid tints for transparency, makes the painter comparatively lose sight of the n.o.bler translucence which is obtained by breaking various colors amidst each other: and even when, as by Correggio, exquisite play of hue is joined with exquisite transparency, the delight in the depth almost always leads the painter into mean and false chiaroscuro; it leads him to like dark backgrounds instead of luminous ones,[42] and to enjoy, in general, quality of color more than grandeur of composition, and confined light rather than open sunshine: so that the really greatest thoughts of the greatest men have always, so far as I remember, been reached in dead color, and the n.o.blest oil pictures of Tintoret and Veronese are those which are likest frescoes.

159. Besides all this, the fact is, that though sometimes a little chalky and coa.r.s.e-looking body-color is, in a sketch, infinitely liker Nature than transparent color: the bloom and mist of distance are accurately and instantly represented by the film of opaque blue (_quite_ accurately, I think, by nothing else); and for ground, rocks, and buildings, the earthy and solid surface is, of course, always truer than the most finished and carefully wrought work in transparent tints can ever be.

160. Against one thing, however, I must steadily caution you. All kinds of color are equally illegitimate, if you think they will allow you to alter at your pleasure, or blunder at your ease. There is _no_ vehicle or method of color which admits of alteration or repentance; you must be right at once, or never; and you might as well hope to catch a rifle bullet in your hand, and put it straight, when it was going wrong, as to recover a tint once spoiled. The secret of all good color in oil, water, or anything else, lies primarily in that sentence spoken to me by Mulready: "Know what you have to do." The process may be a long one, perhaps: you may have to ground with one color; to touch it with fragments of a second; to crumble a third into the interstices; a fourth into the interstices of the third; to glaze the whole with a fifth; and to re-enforce in points with a sixth: but whether you have one, or ten, or twenty processes to go through, you must go _straight_ through them knowingly and foreseeingly all the way; and if you get the thing once wrong, there is no hope for you but in washing or sc.r.a.ping boldly down to the white ground, and beginning again.

161. The drawing in body-color will tend to teach you all this, more than any other method, and above all it will prevent you from falling into the pestilent habit of sponging to get texture; a trick which has nearly ruined our modern water-color school of art. There are sometimes places in which a skillful artist will roughen his paper a little to get certain conditions of dusty color with more ease than he could otherwise; and sometimes a skillfully rased piece of paper will, in the midst of transparent tints, answer nearly the purpose of chalky body-color in representing the surfaces of rocks or building. But artifices of this kind are always treacherous in a tyro's hands, tempting him to trust in them: and you had better always work on white or gray paper as smooth as silk;[43] and never disturb the surface of your color or paper, except finally to scratch out the very highest lights if you are using transparent colors.

162. I have said above that body-color drawing will teach you the use of color better than working with merely transparent tints; but this is not because the process is an easier one, but because it is a more complete one, and also because it involves some working with transparent tints in the best way. You are not to think that because you use body-color you may make any kind of mess that you like, and yet get out of it. But you are to avail yourself of the characters of your material, which enable you most nearly to imitate the processes of Nature. Thus, suppose you have a red rocky cliff to sketch, with blue clouds floating over it. You paint your cliff first firmly, then take your blue, mixing it to such a tint (and here is a great part of the skill needed) that when it is laid over the red, in the thickness required for the effect of the mist, the warm rock-color showing through the blue cloud-color, may bring it to exactly the hue you want (your upper tint, therefore, must be mixed colder than you want it); then you lay it on, varying it as you strike it, getting the forms of the mist at once, and, if it be rightly done, with exquisite quality of color, from the warm tint's showing through and between the particles of the other. When it is dry, you may add a little color to retouch the edges where they want shape, or heighten the lights where they want roundness, or put another tone over the whole: but you can take none away. If you touch or disturb the surface, or by any untoward accident mix the under and upper colors together, all is lost irrecoverably. Begin your drawing from the ground again if you like, or throw it into the fire if you like. But do not waste time in trying to mend it.[44]

163. This discussion of the relative merits of transparent and opaque color has, however, led us a little beyond the point where we should have begun; we must go back to our palette, if you please. Get a cake of each of the hard colors named in the note below[45] and try experiments on their simple combinations, by mixing each color with every other. If you like to do it in an orderly way, you may prepare a squared piece of pasteboard, and put the pure colors in columns at the top and side; the mixed tints being given at the intersections, thus (the letters standing for colors):

b c d e f etc.

a a b a c a d a e a f b -- b c b d b e b f c -- -- c d c e c f d -- -- -- d e d f e -- -- -- -- e f etc.

This will give you some general notion of the characters of mixed tints of two colors only, and it is better in practice to confine yourself as much as possible to these, and to get more complicated colors, either by putting the third _over_ the first blended tint, or by putting the third into its interstices. Nothing but watchful practice will teach you the effects that colors have on each other when thus put over, or beside, each other.

164. When you have got a little used to the princ.i.p.al combinations, place yourself at a window which the sun does not shine in at, commanding some simple piece of landscape: outline this landscape roughly; then take a piece of white cardboard, cut out a hole in it about the size of a large pea; and supposing R is the room, _a d_ the window, and you are sitting at _a_, Fig. 29, hold this cardboard a little outside of the window, upright, and in the direction _b d_, parallel to the side of the window, or a little turned, so as to catch more light, as at _a d_, never turned as at _c d_, or the paper will be dark. Then you will see the landscape, bit by bit, through the circular hole. Match the colors of each important bit as nearly as you can, mixing your tints with white, beside the aperture. When matched, put a touch of the same tint at the top of your paper, writing under it: "dark tree color," "hill color," "field color," as the case may be. Then wash the tint away from beside the opening, and the cardboard will be ready to match another piece of the landscape.[46] When you have got the colors of the princ.i.p.al ma.s.ses thus indicated, lay on a piece of each in your sketch in its right place, and then proceed to complete the sketch in harmony with them, by your eye.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 29.]

165. In the course of your early experiments, you will be much struck by two things: the first, the inimitable brilliancy of light in sky and in sunlighted things; and the second, that among the tints which you can imitate, those which you thought the darkest will continually turn out to be in reality the lightest. Darkness of objects is estimated by us, under ordinary circ.u.mstances, much more by knowledge than by sight; thus, a cedar or Scotch fir, at 200 yards off, will be thought of darker green than an elm or oak near us; because we know by experience that the peculiar color they exhibit, at that distance, is the _sign_ of darkness of foliage. But when we try them through the cardboard, the near oak will be found, indeed, rather dark green, and the distant cedar, perhaps, pale gray-purple. The quant.i.ty of purple and gray in Nature is, by the way, another somewhat surprising subject of discovery.

166. Well, having ascertained thus your princ.i.p.al tints, you may proceed to fill up your sketch; in doing which observe these following particulars:

(1.) Many portions of your subject appeared through the aperture in the paper brighter than the paper, as sky, sunlighted gra.s.s, etc. Leave these portions, for the present, white; and proceed with the parts of which you can match the tints.

(2.) As you tried your subject with the cardboard, you must have observed how many changes of hue took place over small s.p.a.ces. In filling up your work, try to educate your eye to perceive these differences of hue without the help of the cardboard, and lay them deliberately, like a mosaic-worker, as separate colors, preparing each carefully on your palette, and laying it as if it were a patch of colored cloth, cut out, to be fitted neatly by its edge to the next patch; so that the _fault_ of your work may be, not a slurred or misty look, but a patched bed-cover look, as if it had all been cut out with scissors. For instance, in drawing the trunk of a birch tree, there will be probably white high lights, then a pale rosy gray round them on the light side, then a (probably greenish) deeper gray on the dark side, varied by reflected colors, and, over all, rich black strips of bark and brown spots of moss. Lay first the rosy gray, leaving white for the high lights _and for the spots of moss_, and not touching the dark side. Then lay the gray for the dark side, fitting it well up to the rosy gray of the light, leaving also in this darker gray the white paper in the places for the black and brown moss; then prepare the moss colors separately for each spot, and lay each in the white place left for it.

Not one grain of white, except that purposely left for the high lights, must be visible when the work is done, even through a magnifying-gla.s.s, so cunningly must you fit the edges to each other. Finally, take your background colors, and put them on each side of the tree trunk, fitting them carefully to its edge.