The Crown of Wild Olive
anything goes wrong, it is nearly sure to be refinement that is wanting,
not force; and connexion, not alteration. If you dislike the state your
drawing is in, do not lose patience with it, nor dash at it, nor alter
its plan, nor rub it desperately out, at the place you think wrong; but
look if there are no shadows you can gradate more perfectly; no little
gaps 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 take
another look. A very useful expedient in producing some effects, is to
wet 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 it
gradates itself as it dries; when dry, you can reinforce it with
delicate stippling when you want it darker. Also, while the colour is
still damp on the paper, by drying your brush thoroughly, and touching
the colour with the brush so dried, you may take out soft lights with
great tenderness and precision. Try all sorts of experiments of this
kind, noticing how the colour behaves; but remembering always that your
final results must be obtained, and can only be obtained, by pure work
with 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 than
yours, that you cannot possibly get all, or anything _like_ all, the
gradations of shadow in any given group. When this is the case,
determine first to keep the broad masses of things distinct: if, for
instance, there is a green book, and a white piece of paper, and a black
inkstand 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 as
to equal in depth the darkness of the inkstand. The great difference
between the masters of light and shade, and imperfect artists, is the
power of the former to draw so delicately as to express form in a
dark-coloured object with little light, and in a light-coloured object
with little darkness; and it is better even to leave the forms here and
there unsatisfactorily rendered than to lose the general relations of
the great masses. And this observe, not because masses are grand or
desirable things in your composition (for with composition at present
you have nothing whatever to do), but because it is a _fact_ that things
do 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, at
once, that no detail can be as strongly expressed in drawing as it is in
the reality; and strive to keep all your shadows and marks and minor
markings on the masses, lighter than they appear to be in Nature, you
are sure otherwise to get them too dark. You will in doing this find
that you cannot get the _projection_ of things sufficiently shown; but
never mind that; there is no need that they should appear to project,
but great need that their relations of shade to each other should be
preserved. All deceptive projection is obtained by partial exaggeration
of shadow; and whenever you see it, you may be sure the drawing is more
or less bad; a thoroughly fine drawing or painting will always show a
slight tendency towards _flatness_.
Observe, on the other hand, that however white an object may be, there
is always some small point of it whiter than the rest. You must
therefore have a slight tone of grey over everything in your picture
except on the extreme high lights; even the piece of white paper, in
your subject, must be toned slightly down, unless (and there are a
thousand chances to one against its being so) it should all be turned so
as fully to front the light. By examining the treatment of the white
objects 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 the
undulations of surfaces and the relations of masses, you may proceed to
draw more complicated and beautiful things.[214] And first, the boughs
of trees, now not in mere dark relief, but in full rounding. Take the
first bit of branch or stump that comes to hand, with a fork in it; cut
off the ends of the forking branches, so as to leave the whole only
about a foot in length; get a piece of paper the same size, fix your bit
of branch in some place where its position will not be altered, and draw
it thoroughly, in all its light and shade, full size; striving, above
all things, to get an accurate expression of its structure at the fork
of 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 see
it. Wherever you have fastened the bough, you must draw whatever is
behind it, ugly or not, else you will never know whether the light and
shade are right; they may appear quite wrong to you, only for want of
the background. And this general law is to be observed in all your
studies: whatever you draw, draw completely and unalteringly, else you
never know if what you have done is right, or whether you _could_ have
done it rightly had you tried. There is nothing _visible_ out of which
you may not get useful practice.
Next, to put the leaves on your boughs. Gather a small twig with four or
five leaves on it, put it into water, put a sheet of light-coloured or
white paper behind it, so that all the leaves may be relieved in dark
from the white field; then sketch in their dark shape carefully with
pencil as you did the complicated boughs, in order to be sure that all
their masses and interstices are right in shape before you begin
shading, and complete as far as you can with pen and ink, in the manner
of Fig. 6., which is a young shoot of lilac.
You will probably, in spite of all your pattern drawings, be at first
puzzled by leaf foreshortening; especially because the look of
retirement or projection depends not so much on the perspective of the
leaves themselves as on the double sight of the two eyes. Now there are
certain artifices by which good painters can partly conquer this
difficulty; as slight exaggerations of force or colour in the nearer
parts, and of obscurity in the more distant ones; but you must not
attempt 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 point
of one of the leaves against, and so sketch the whole bough as you see
it in a fixed position, looking with one eye only. Your drawing never
can 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 with
one, and you must be content when you have got a resemblance on these
terms.
In order to get clearly at the notion of the thing to be done, take a
single long leaf, hold it with its point towards you, and as flat as you
can, so as to see nothing of it but its thinness, as if you wanted to
know how thin it was; outline it so. Then slope it down gradually
towards you, and watch it as it lengthens out to its full length, held
perpendicularly down before you. Draw it in three or four different
positions between these extremes, with its ribs as they appear in each
position, and you will soon find out how it must be.
Draw first only two or three of the leaves; then larger clusters; and
practise, in this way, more and more complicated pieces of bough and
leafage, till you find you can master the most difficult arrangements,
not consisting of more than ten or twelve leaves. You will find as you
do 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 the
great masters; you will see that very often their best backgrounds are
composed of little more than a few sprays of leafage, carefully studied,
brought against the distant sky; and that another wreath or two form the
chief interest of their foregrounds. If you live in London you may test
your progress _accurately_ by the degree of admiration you feel for the
leaves of vine round the head of the Bacchus, in Titian's Bacchus and
Ariadne. All this, however, will not enable you to draw a mass of
foliage. You will find, on looking at any rich piece of vegetation, that
it is only one or two of the nearer clusters that you can by any
possibility draw in this complete manner. The mass is too vast, and too
intricate, to be thus dealt with.
You must now therefore have recourse to some confused mode of execution,
capable of expressing the confusion of Nature. And, first, you must
understand what the character of that confusion is. If you look
carefully at the outer sprays of any tree at twenty or thirty yards'
distance, you will see them defined against the sky in masses, which, at
first, look quite definite; but if you examine them, you will see,
mingled with the real shapes of leaves, many indistinct lines, which
are, some of them, stalks of leaves, and some, leaves seen with the edge
turned towards you, and coming into sight in a broken way; for,
supposing the real leaf shape to be as at _a_, Fig. 7., this, when
removed some yards from the eye, will appear dark against the sky, as at
_b_; then, when removed some yards farther still, the stalk and point
disappear altogether, the middle of the leaf becomes little more than a
line; and the result is the condition at _c_, only with this farther
subtlety in the look of it, inexpressible in the woodcut, that the stalk
and 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 remains
visible, so that its perfect effect could only be rendered by two layers
of colour, one subduing the sky tone a little, the next drawing the
broken portions of the leaf, as at _c_, and carefully indicating the
greater darkness of the spot in the middle, where the under side of the
leaf is.
This is the perfect theory of the matter. In practice we cannot reach
such accuracy; but we shall be able to render the general look of the
foliage satisfactorily by the following mode of practice.
Gather a spray of any tree, about a foot or eighteen inches long. Fix it
firmly by the stem in anything that will support it steadily; put it
about eight feet away from you, or ten if you are far-sighted. Put a
sheet of not very white paper behind it, as usual. Then draw very
carefully, first placing them with pencil, and then filling them up with
ink, every leaf, mass and stalk of it in simple black profile, as you
see them against the paper: Fig. 8. is a bough of Phillyrea so drawn. Do
not be afraid of running the leaves into a black mass when they come
together; this exercise is only to teach you what the actual shapes of
such masses are when seen against the sky.
Make two careful studies of this kind of one bough of every common
tree--oak, ash, elm, birch, beech, &c.; in fact, if you are good, and
industrious, you will make one such study carefully at least three times
a week, until you have examples of every sort of tree and shrub you can
get branches of. You are to make two studies of each bough, for this
reason--all masses of foliage have an upper and under surface, and the
side view of them, or profile, shows a wholly different organisation of