The Crown of Wild Olive
top of your paper, between the lines; and having struck on the first
brushful of colour, and led it down a little, dip your brush deep in
water, and mix up the colour on the plate quickly with as much more
water as the brush takes up at that one dip: then, with this paler
colour, lead the tint farther down. Dip in water again, mix the colour
again, and thus lead down the tint, always dipping in water once between
each replenishing of the brush, and stirring the colour on the plate
well, but as quickly as you can. Go on until the colour has become so
pale 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 it
with the dry brush, and leave it to dry.
If you get to the bottom of your paper before your colour gets pale, you
may either take longer paper, or begin, with the tint as it was when you
left off, on another sheet; but be sure to exhaust it to pure whiteness
at last. When all is quite dry, recommence at the top with another
similar mixture of colour, and go down in the same way. Then again, and
then again, and so continually until the colour at the top of the paper
is as dark as your cake of Prussian blue, and passes down into pure
white paper at the end of your column, with a perfectly smooth gradation
from one into the other.
You will find at first that the paper gets mottled or wavy, instead of
evenly gradated; this is because at some places you have taken up more
water in your brush than at others, or not mixed it thoroughly on the
plate, or led one tint too far before replenishing with the next.
Practice only will enable you to do it well; the best artists cannot
always get gradations of this kind quite to their minds; nor do they
ever leave them on their pictures without after touching.
As you get more power, and can strike the colour more quickly down, you
will be able to gradate in less compass;[205] beginning with a small
quantity of colour, and adding a drop of water, instead of a brushful;
with finer brushes, also, you may gradate to a less scale. But slight
skill will enable you to test the relations of colour to shade as far as
is necessary for your immediate progress, which is to be done thus:--
Take cakes of lake, of gamboge, of sepia, of blue-black, of cobalt, and
vermilion; and prepare gradated columns (exactly as you have done with
the Prussian blue) of the lake and blue-black.[206] Cut a narrow slip
all the way down, of each gradated colour, and set the three slips side
by side; fasten them down, and rule lines at equal distances across all
the three, so as to divide them into fifty degrees, and number the
degrees of each, from light to dark, 1, 2, 3, &c. If you have gradated
them rightly, the darkest part either of the red or blue will be nearly
equal in power to the darkest part of the blue-black, and any degree of
the black slip will also, accurately enough for our purpose, balance in
weight 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 you
can match their colour by any compartment of the crimson or blue in your
scales, the grey in the compartment of the grey scale marked with the
same number is the grey which must represent that crimson or blue in
your light and shade drawing.
Next, prepare scales with gamboge, cobalt, and vermilion. You will find
that you cannot darken these beyond a certain point;[207] for yellow and
scarlet, so long as they remain yellow and scarlet, cannot approach to
black; 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 the
upper half of the vermilion and gamboge; and Prussian blue to darken the
cobalt. You will thus have three more scales, passing from white nearly
to black, through yellow and orange, through sky-blue, and through
scarlet. By mixing the gamboge and Prussian blue you may make another
with green; mixing the cobalt and lake, another with violet; the sepia
alone will make a forcible brown one; and so on, until you have as many
scales as you like, passing from black to white through different
colours. Then, supposing your scales properly gradated and equally
divided, the compartment or degree No. 1. of the grey will represent in
chiaroscuro 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 understand
the principle; for it would never be possible for you to gradate your
scales so truly as to make them practically accurate and serviceable;
and even if you could, unless you had about ten thousand scales, and
were able to change them faster than ever juggler changed cards, you
could not in a day measure the tints on so much as one side of a
frost-bitten apple: but when once you fully understand the principle,
and see how all colours contain as it were a certain quantity of
darkness, or power of dark relief from white--some more, some less; and
how this pitch or power of each may be represented by equivalent values
of grey, you will soon be able to arrive shrewdly at an approximation by
a glance of the eye, without any measuring scale at all.
You must now go on, again with the pen, drawing patterns, and any shapes
of shade that you think pretty, as veinings in marble, or
tortoise-shell, spots in surfaces of shells, &c., as tenderly as you
can, in the darknesses that correspond to their colours; and when you
find 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 round
or oval stone you can find, not very white, nor very dark; and the
smoother it is the better, only it must not _shine_. Draw your table
near the window, and put the stone, which I will suppose is about the
size of _a_ in Fig. 5. (it had better not be much larger), on a piece of
not very white paper, on the table in front of you. Sit so that the
light may come from your left, else the shadow of the pencil point
interferes with your sight of your work. You must not let the _sun_ fall
on the stone, but only ordinary light: therefore choose a window which
the sun does not come in at. If you can shut the shutters of the other
windows in the room it will be all the better; but this is not of much
consequence.
Now, if you can draw that stone, you can draw anything: I mean, anything
that is drawable. Many things (sea foam, for instance) cannot be drawn
at all, only the idea of them more or less suggested; but if you can
draw the stone _rightly_, every thing within reach of art is also within
yours.
For all drawing depends, primarily, on your power of representing
_Roundness_. If you can once do that, all the rest is easy and
straightforward; if you cannot do that, nothing else that you may be
able 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 are
rounded, cheeks are rounded, and curls are rounded: there is no more
flatness in the natural world than there is vacancy. The world itself is
round, 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 you
have won the battle.
Look your stone antagonist boldly in the face. You will see that the
side of it next the window is lighter than most of the paper: that the
side of it farthest from the window is darker than the paper; and that
the light passes into the dark gradually, while a shadow is thrown to
the right _on_ the paper itself by the stone: the general appearance of
things being more or less as in _a_, Fig. 5., the spots on the stone
excepted, of which more presently.
Now, remember always what was stated in the outset, that every thing you
can see in Nature is seen only so far as it is lighter or darker than
the things about it, or of a different colour from them. It is either
seen as a patch of one colour on a ground of another; or as a pale thing
relieved from a dark thing, or a dark thing from a pale thing. And if
you 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 will
produce the appearance of the object and its ground. The best
draughtsman--Titian and Paul Veronese themselves--could do no more than
this; and you will soon be able to get some power of doing it in an
inferior way, if you once understand the exceeding simplicity of what is
to be done. Suppose you have a brown book on a white sheet of paper, on
a 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 in
the same degrees, and your drawing is done. If you will not look at what
you 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 paper
with "vigorous" lines, or to produce anything, in fact, but the plain,
unaffected, and finished tranquillity of the thing before you, you need
not hope to get on. Nature will show you nothing if you set yourself up
for her master. But forget yourself, and try to obey _her_, and you will
find obedience easier 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 are
dissatisfied with your work, it is always too coarse or too uneven. It
may 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 its
shades are in blotches, or scratches, or full of white holes. Get it
more tender and more true, and you will find it is more powerful.
Do not, therefore, think your drawing must be weak because you have a
finely pointed pen in your hand. Till you can draw with that, you can
draw with nothing; when you can draw with that, you can draw with a log
of wood charred at the end. True boldness and power are only to be
gained by care. Even in fencing and dancing, all ultimate ease depends
on early precision in the commencement; much more in singing or
drawing.
Now, I do not want you to copy Fig. 5., but to copy the stone before you
in the way that Fig. 5. is done. To which end, first measure the extreme
length of the stone with compasses, and mark that length on your paper;
then, between the points marked, leave something like the form of the
stone 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 you
begin finishing, so sketch it in quite rudely; only rather leave too
_much_ room for the high light, than too little: and then more
cautiously fill in the shade, shutting the light gradually up, and
putting in the dark cautiously on the dark side. You need not plague
yourself about accuracy of shape, because, till you have practised a
great deal, it is impossible for you to draw that shape quite truly, and
you 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 solid
and round, not much minding what its exact contour is--only draw it as
nearly 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 draw
the outline at first. For you can _see_ no outline; what you see is only
a certain space of gradated shade, with other such spaces about it; and