The Painter in Oil Part 9

Drawing is basic to painting. Good painting cannot exist without it. I do not mean that there must be always the outline felt or seen, but that the understanding of relative position, size, and form must be felt; and that is drawing. Drawing is not merely form, but implies these other things, and painting is not legible without them. They go to the completeness of expression. Movement, and action, as well as composition and all that it implies or includes, depend upon drawing, and they are vital to a painting.

=Importance of Drawing.=--Much has been said and written of drawing as being the most important thing in a picture; so much so, as to excuse all sorts of shortcomings in other directions. This is a mistake.

Drawing is essential because you cannot lay on color to express anything without the colors taking shape, and this is drawing. But still the color itself, and other characteristics which are not strictly a part of drawing, are quite as important to painting, simply because the thing without them could not be a painting at all: it would be a drawing.

All painters fall into two cla.s.ses,--those who are most sensitive to the refinements of form, and those most sensitive to refinements of color and tone. But the great colorists, the painters _par excellence_, the workers in pigment before everything else, those who find their sentiment mainly there, these are the men who have made painting what it is, and who have brought out its possibilities. And looking at painting from their point of view, drawing cannot be more important than other qualities.

=Neglect of Drawing.=--Great artists have sometimes not been perfect draughtsmen. They have been careless of exactness of form. But they have always been strong in the great essentials of drawing, and they have made up for such deficiencies as they showed, by their greatness in other directions. Delacroix, for instance, sometimes let his temperament run him into carelessness of form in his hurry to express his temperamental richness of color. These things are superficial to the greater ends he had in view, but we have to distinctly forgive it in accepting the picture. And a great colorist may be so forgiven; he makes up for his fault by other things. But there is no forgiveness for the student or the painter who is simply a poor draughtsman.

The effect of neglect of drawing is to make a weak picture. A painter, who was also an exceptionally fine draughtsman, once spoke of work weak in drawing as resembling "boned turkey." Lack of firmness, indecision, characterize the painter who cannot draw. Those firm, simple, but effective touches which are evident somewhere in the work of all good painters, are impossible without draughtsmanship. They mean precision. Precision means position. Position means drawing.

=Proportions.=--All good work is from the general to the particular, from the ma.s.s to the detail. Keep that in mind as a fundamental principle in good work, whatever the kind. You should never place a detail till you have placed your larger ma.s.ses. The relative importance of things depends on the consideration of those most important first. Let this be your first rule in drawing.

Proportions next. Largest proportions, then exactness of relative proportions. Study first in ma.s.ses. See nothing at first but the large planes. As Hunt said, "Hang the nose on to the head, not the head on to the nose." In getting proportions of the great ma.s.ses, let no small variations of line or form break into your study of the whole.

Therefore, see outlines first in straight lines and angles. If you cannot see them at first, study to find them; look at the long lines of movement; ma.s.s several curves into one line representing the general direction of them. Train yourself to look at things in this way. There is nothing which will not fall into position so. This will not be easy at first. The training of a quick perception of these things is a part of your training in drawing--the first essential. It is not that the straight lines are to be sought for themselves, but that they simplify the first breaking up of the whole into its parts, and so makes more easy the study of proportion. The accuracy of the general ma.s.ses makes possible a greater accuracy of the lesser proportions which come within them.

You see form more truly also, when the perception of it is founded on a ma.s.s or a line indicating the larger character of it. It saves time for you, too. You do not have to rub out so much. The great lines and planes once established, everything else falls naturally into place.

Spend much time over this part of a drawing. Cut the time you give to a drawing into parts, and let the part given to the laying in of larger proportions be from a third to a half of the whole time, and study and correct these until they are right.

Once these are right a very slight accent tells for twice what it would otherwise, and so you need much less detail to give the effect.

=Modelling.=--In the same way that you have laid out the proportions in ma.s.s, lay out your proportions of light and shade. Model your drawing by avoiding the small until the large variations of shade are in place. Avoid seeing curves in relief as you have avoided curves of outline. Try to a.n.a.lyze the modelling into flat planes, each one large enough to give a definite ma.s.s of relief. Don't be afraid of an edge in doing this. Let your flat tone come frankly up to the next tone and stop. This again is not for any effect in itself, but only for facility and exactness. Later you can loose it as much as you see fit in breaking up the drawing into the more delicate planes, and these again into the most subtle.

Study first the outline and then the planes. Constantly compare them as to relation; you will find it suggestive. Remember that your aim is to produce a whole, not a lot of parts, and although a whole includes the parts, the parts are incidental.

=Measurements.=--You will always have to use measurements for the sake of accuracy. Probably you will never be able to dispense with them.

The best way would be to take them as a matter of course, and get so that you make them almost mechanically, without thinking of it. You will save yourself an immense deal of time and trouble by accepting this at once; for accuracy is impossible without measurements, and the habit of accuracy is the greatest time-saver.

Hold your charcoal in your hand freely, so that your thumb can slip along it and mark off parts of the object when you sight at them across the coal. Measure horizontal and vertical proportions into themselves and into each other. Height and breadth are checks to each other. If the height is a certain proportion of the breadth, then the smaller proportions of height must have equivalent proportions to each other _as well as to breadth_. Measure these and you are sure of being right.

=Steps.=--Divide your drawing into steps or stages of work. You will find it a helpful thing in studying. You will do it quite naturally later. Do it deliberately at first, as a matter of training.

_First step._--Measure the extreme height and breadth of the whole group or object of your drawing, with accuracy, and mark each extreme.

_Second step._--Outline the great ma.s.s of it with the simplest lines possible. Give the general shape of the whole. This blocks it in.

_Third step._--Measure each of the objects in the group, or the parts most prominent, if it be a single object. Measure its height and breadth, both in its own proportion and in proportion to the dimensions of the other parts and of the whole. Enclose it in straight lines as you did with the whole ma.s.s.

_Fourth step._--Find the more important of the lesser proportions in each object, and block them out also. This should map out your drawing exactly and with some completeness.

_Fifth step._--Lay in simple flat tones to fill in these outlines, and keep the relations of light and dark very carefully as you do so.

_Sixth step._--This should leave your paper with a few large ma.s.ses of dark and light, which can now be cut into again with the next smaller ma.s.ses, giving more refinement to the whole. This also should so break up the edges as to get rid of any feeling of squareness or edginess.

_Seventh step._--Put in such accents of dark, or take out such of light, as will give necessary character and force to the drawing.

I do not say that this method produces the most finished drawing; but it is a most excellent way to study drawing, and, more or less modified, is practically the basis of all methods. In practised hands it allows of any amount of exactness or freedom of execution. I have seen most beautiful work done in this way.

=Home Study.=--It is not necessary to have a teacher in order to draw well; but it is necessary to find out what are the essentials of good drawing, and to work definitely and acquire them.

Good drawing is a combination of exactness and freedom; and the exactness must come first. The structure of the thing must be shown without unnecessary detail. You should always look at any really good drawing you can come at, and try to see what there may be in it of helpful suggestion to you.

[Ill.u.s.tration: =Drawing of Hands.= _Durer._]

=Study the Masters.=--Get photographs of drawings by the masters of drawing, and study them. See how they searched their model for form and character. Do not make so much of the actual stroke as the manner in which it is made to express and lend itself to the meaning.

In this drawing by Albrecht Durer you have a splendid example of exactness and feeling for character. You could have no better type of what to look for and how to express it. Although it is not important that you should lay on the lines of shading just as this is done, it is important to notice how naturally they follow, and conform to, the character of the surface--which is one of the ways in which the point helps to search out the modelling.

This drawing is made with a black and a white chalk on a gray ground; a very good way to study.

A good hint is also offered in this drawing, of the modesty of the old masters, in subject. A hand or part of any object is enough to study from. There is no need to always demand a picture in everything you do.

=Materials.=--For all purposes which come in the range of the painter you should use charcoal. For purposes of study it is the most satisfactory of materials; it is sensitive, easily controlled, and easily corrected. For sketching or preliminary drawing on the canvas it is equally good.

You should have also a plumb-line with which to test vertical positions of parts in relation to each other, and this, with the pencil held horizontally for other relative positions, gives you all you need in that direction.

In drawing on the canvas it is not often necessary to do more than place the various objects and draw their outlines carefully and accurately. Sometimes, however, as in faces, or in pictures which include important figures, you will need a shaded drawing, and this can be done perfectly with charcoal, and fixed with fixative afterwards.

=Imitation.=--Perfect drawing, in the sense of exact drawing, is not the most important thing. A drawing may be exact, and yet not be the truer for it. It may be inexact, and yet be true to the greater character. So, too, the drawing may have to change an accidental fact which is not worth the trouble of expression or which will injure the whole. There is something more important than detail, and the essential characteristics can be expressed sometimes only by a drawing which is deliberately false in certain things in order to be the more true to the larger fact.

Then, too, there is an individuality which the artist has to express through his representation of the external; and he is justified in altering or slighting facts in order to bring about that more important self-expression. Of course the self must be worth expressing. There is no excuse for mere falsification nor for mere inability. But a good workman will not be guilty of that, and the complete picture in its unity will be his justification for whatever means he has taken.

=Feeling.=--Drawing must be a matter of feeling. A perception of essential truth of a thing, as much as of trained observation of the facts. The good draughtsman becomes so by training his observation of facts first, always searching for those most important, and emphasizing those; and with the power which will come in time to his eye and hand easily and quickly to grasp and express facts, will come also the power of mind to grasp the essential characteristics. And the trained hand and eye will permit the most perfect freedom of expression. This is the desideratum of the student; this is the end to be aimed at,--the perfect union of the trained eye and hand to see and do, and the trained mind to feel and select, and the freedom of expression which comes of that perfect union.

CHAPTER XVII

VALUES

=The Term.=--The word "values" is seldom understood by the average individual, yet it should not be difficult to take in. It means simply the relation between degrees of strength of light and dark, and of color considered as light and dark. Translate the word into "importance," and think what it means. The relative importance, strength, force, power, value, of a touch of color to make itself felt in the whole--that is its value. A weak value is a note which does not make itself felt; a strong value is one which does. A false value is a touch of color which has not its proper relation to the other spots or ma.s.ses of color in the picture, _considered_ as _light and dark_--_not as color per se_.

=Importance.=--As soon as you grasp this idea you see at once how important values must be to the whole picture. It is not possible to do any good work, either in black and white or color, without it. In one sense it is incidental to drawing. When you consider drawing as the expression of modelling, the relative roundness of parts, and of relief, as well as outline, values come into play to give the relations of planes of light and dark in black and white. In this it becomes part of drawing.

=Values and Color.=--As soon, however, as color becomes a part of the picture, values become the basis of modern painting as distinguished from the painting of previous centuries. Values, of course, always existed wherever good painting existed, because you cannot paint without recognizing the relations, the relative pitch and relative strength of tones. But the word is never heard in relation to old masters. It is apparently of quite modern coinage and use, and it probably was coined because of a new and greater importance of the fact which it represents.

The older painters in painting a picture kept parts of a whole object--a head or a figure, say--in relation to itself; and that was values--but restricted values. The whole picture was arranged on the basis of arbitrary lighting, which entered into the scheme of composition of that picture. This is not values, but what is generally understood by the older writers when they speak of "chiaroscuro." The modern painter deals little with chiaroscuro. It is almost obsolete as a technical word. Arbitrary arrangement of light and shade in a picture is not usual nowadays, and consequently the word which expressed it has dropped somewhat into disuse.

=Basis of Modern Painting.=--Instead of the old composition in arbitrary light and shade, the modern painter accepts the actual arrangement of light as the basis of his picture, and spreads the values over the whole canvas. In this way the quality of "value"

becomes the very foundation of the modern picture. For you cannot accept the ordinary or actual condition of light, as governing the light and shade of your picture, without extending the same scheme of relations over the whole canvas. Every most insignificant spot of light and shade and color, as well as the most significant, must keep its place, must hold its true relation to every other spot and to all the rest. Each value must keep its place according to the laws of fact, or it is out of touch with the whole. The whole picture must be either on a scheme of general fact, or a scheme of general arbitrary arrangement. Any one piece of arbitrary arrangement in this connection must be backed up by other pieces of arbitrary arrangement, or else there must be no arbitrary arrangement at all. The modern painter accepts the former; and the importance of "values" is the result.

=Absolute and Relative Values.=--We may speak of values as absolute or relative. This relates to the key or pitch of a painting. It is the contribution to the art of painting which was made by the French painter, Manet. You may paint a picture in the same pitch as nature, or you may transpose it to a higher or a lower pitch.

The relations of the different values of the picture will hold the same relation to each other as the values of nature do to each other.

But the actual pitch of each, the relation of each to an absolute light or an absolute dark, will be higher or lower than in nature.

This would be relative values.