The Crown of Wild Olive
attaining even an approximation to such a power; the main point being,
not that every line should be precisely what we intend or wish, but that
the line which we intended or wished to draw should be right. If we
always see rightly and mean rightly, we shall get on, though the hand
may stagger a little; but if we mean wrongly, or mean nothing, it does
not matter how firm the hand is. Do not, therefore, torment yourself
because you cannot do as well as you would like; but work patiently,
sure that every square and letter will give you a certain increase of
power; and as soon as you can draw your letters pretty well, here is a
more 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 other
light ground: it must not be against strong light, or you will find the
looking at it hurts your eyes; nor must it be in sunshine, or you will
be 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 is
the best for this practice.
You will see that _all_ the boughs of the tree are _dark_ against the
sky. Consider them as so many dark rivers, to be laid down in a map with
absolute accuracy; and, without the least thought about the _roundness_
of the stems, map them all out in flat shade, scrawling them in with
pencil, just as you did the limbs of your letters; then correct and
alter them, rubbing out and out again, never minding how much your paper
is dirtied (only not destroying its surface), until every bough is
exactly, or as near as your utmost power can bring it, right in
curvature and in thickness. Look at the white interstices between them
with as much scrupulousness as if they were little estates which you had
to survey, and draw maps of, for some important lawsuit, involving heavy
penalties if you cut the least bit of a corner off any of them, or gave
the hedge anywhere too deep a curve; and try continually to fancy the
whole tree nothing but a flat ramification on a white ground. Do not
take any trouble about the little twigs, which look like a confused
network or mist; leave them all out,[204] drawing only the main branches
as far as you can see them distinctly, your object at present being not
to draw a tree, but to _learn how_ to do so. When you have got the thing
as nearly right as you can--and it is better to make one good study than
twenty left unnecessarily inaccurate--take your pen, and put a fine
outline to all the boughs, as you did to your letter, taking care, as
far as possible, to put the outline within the edge of the shade, so as
not to make the boughs thicker: the main use of the outline is to
_affirm_ the whole more clearly; to do away with little accidental
roughnesses and excrescences, and especially to mark where boughs cross,
or come in front of each other, as at such points their arrangement in
this kind of sketch is unintelligible without the outline. It may
perfectly well happen that in Nature it should be less distinct than
your outline will make it; but it is better in this kind of sketch to
mark the facts clearly. The temptation is always to be slovenly and
careless, and the outline is like a bridle, and forces our indolence
into attention and precision. The outline should be about the thickness
of that in Fig. 4, which represents the ramification of a small stone
pine, only I have not endeavoured to represent the pencil shading within
the outline, as I could not easily express it in a woodcut; and you have
nothing to do at present with the indication of the foliage above, of
which in another place. You may also draw your trees as much larger
than this figure as you like; only, however large they may be, keep the
outline as delicate, and draw the branches far enough into their outer
sprays to give quite as slender ramification as you have in this figure,
otherwise you do not get good enough practice out of them.
You cannot do too many studies of this kind: every one will give you
some new notion about trees: but when you are tired of tree boughs, take
any forms whatever which are drawn in flat colour, one upon another; as
patterns on any kind of cloth, or flat china (tiles, for instance),
executed in two colours only; and practice drawing them of the right
shape and size by the eye, and filling them in with shade of the depth
required.
In doing this, you will first have to meet the difficulty of
representing depth of colour by depth of shade. Thus a pattern of
ultramarine blue will have to be represented by a darker tint of grey
than a pattern of yellow.
And now it is both time for you to begin to learn the mechanical use of
the brush, and necessary for you to do so in order to provide yourself
with the gradated scale of colour which you will want. If you can, by
any means, get acquainted with any ordinarily skilful water-colour
painter, and prevail on him to show you how to lay on tints with a
brush, by all means do so; not that you are yet, nor for a long while
yet, to begin to colour, but because the brush is often more convenient
than the pencil for laying on masses or tints of shade, and the sooner
you know how to manage it as an instrument the better. If, however, you
have no opportunity of seeing how water-colour is laid on by a workman
of 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 as
to take up a drop, and rub it in a white saucer till you cannot rub much
more, and the colour gets dark, thick, and oily-looking. Put two
teaspoonfuls of water to the colour you have rubbed down, and mix it
well 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 or
pasteboard; divide it, with your pencil and rule, into squares as large
as those of the very largest chess-board: they need not be perfect
squares, only as nearly so as you can quickly guess. Rest the pasteboard
on something sloping as much as an ordinary desk; then, dipping your
brush into the colour you have mixed, and taking up as much of the
liquid as it will carry, begin at the top of one of the squares, and lay
a pond or runlet of colour along the top edge. Lead this pond of colour
gradually downwards, not faster at one place than another, but as if you
were adding a row of bricks to a building, all along (only building down
instead of up), dipping the brush frequently so as to keep the colour as
full in that, and in as great quantity on the paper, as you can, so only
that 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 all
in. When you get to the bottom, the colour will lodge there in a great
wave. Have ready a piece of blotting-paper; dry your brush on it, and
with the dry brush take up the superfluous colour as you would with a
sponge, till it all looks even.
In leading the colour down, you will find your brush continually go over
the edge of the square, or leave little gaps within it. Do not endeavour
to retouch these, nor take much care about them; the great thing is to
get the colour to lie smoothly where it reaches, not in alternate blots
and pale patches; try, therefore, to lead it over the square as fast as
possible, with such attention to your limit as you are able to give. The
use of the exercise is, indeed, to enable you finally to strike the
colour up to the limit with perfect accuracy; but the first thing is to
get it even, the power of rightly striking the edge comes only by time
and practice; even the greatest artists rarely can do this quite
perfectly.
When you have done one square, proceed to do another which does not
communicate with it. When you have thus done all the alternate squares,
as on a chess-board, turn the pasteboard upside down, begin again with
the 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 increase
of darkness towards the bottom of the squares, which would otherwise
take place from the ponding of the colour.
Be resolved to use blotting-paper, or a piece of rag, instead of your
lips, to dry the brush. The habit of doing so, once acquired, will save
you from much partial poisoning. Take care, however, always to draw the
brush from root to point, otherwise you will spoil it. You may even wipe
it 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, and
cherish 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 colour
is exhausted, mix more in the same proportions, two teaspoonfuls to as
much as you can grind with a drop; and when you have done the alternate
squares three times over, as the paper will be getting very damp, and
dry more slowly, begin on the white squares, and bring them up to the
same tint in the same way. The amount of jagged dark line which then
will mark the limits of the squares will be the exact measure of your
unskilfulness.
As soon as you tire of squares draw circles (with compasses); and then
draw straight lines irregularly across circles, and fill up the spaces
so produced between the straight line and the circumference; and then
draw any simple shapes of leaves, according to the exercise No. 2., and
fill up those, until you can lay on colour quite evenly in any shape you
want.
You will find in the course of this practice, as you cannot always put
exactly the same quantity of water to the colour, that the darker the
colour 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 the
forms required with a full brush, and a dark tint, at once, instead of
laying several coats one over another; always taking care that the tint,
however dark, be quite liquid; and that, after being laid on, so much of
it is absorbed as to prevent its forming a black line at the edge as it
dries. A little experience will teach you how apt the colour is to do
this, 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 the
edge.
When, however, you begin to cover complicated forms with the darker
colour, no rapidity will prevent the tint from drying irregularly as it
is led on from part to part. You will then find the following method
useful. Lay in the colour very pale and liquid; so pale, indeed, that
you can only just see where it is on the paper. Lead it up to all the
outlines, and make it precise in form, keeping it thoroughly wet
everywhere. Then, when it is all in shape, take the darker colour, and
lay some of it _into_ the middle of the liquid colour. It will spread
gradually in a branchy kind of way, and you may now lead it up to the
outlines already determined, and play it with the brush till it fills
its place well; then let it dry, and it will be as flat and pure as a
single dash, yet defining all the complicated forms accurately.
Having thus obtained the power of laying on a tolerably flat tint, you
must try to lay on a gradated one. Prepare the colour with three or four
teaspoonfuls of water; then, when it is mixed, pour away about
two-thirds of it, keeping a teaspoonful of pale colour. Sloping your
paper as before, draw two pencil lines all the way down, leaving a space
between them of the width of a square on your chess-board. Begin at the