The Crown of Wild Olive
the most finished and carefully wrought work in transparent tints can
ever be.
Against one thing, however, I must steadily caution you. All kinds of
colour 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 colour 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 colour 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 colour; 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 reinforce 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 scraping boldly down
to the white ground, and beginning again.
The drawing in body-colour 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-colour school of art. There are sometimes places
in which a skilful artist will roughen his paper a little to get certain
conditions of dusty colour with more ease than he could otherwise; and
sometimes a skilfully rased piece of paper will, in the midst of
transparent tints, answer nearly the purpose of chalky body-colour in
representing the surfaces of rocks or buildings. 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 grey paper as smooth as
silk;[236] and never disturb the surface of your colour or paper, except
finally to scratch out the very highest lights if you are using
transparent colours.
I have said above that body-colour drawing will teach you the use of
colour 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-colour 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-colour showing
through the blue cloud-colour, 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
colour, from the warm tint's showing through and between the particles
of the other. When it is dry, you may add a little colour 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 colours 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.[237]
This discussion of the relative merits of transparent and opaque colour
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 colours named in the note below[238] and try experiments on
their simple combinations, by mixing each colour 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 colours in columns at the top and side;
the mixed tints being given at the intersections, thus (the letters
standing for colours):
b c d e f &c.
a ab ac ad ae af
b -- bc bd be bf
c -- -- cd ce cf
d -- -- -- de df
e -- -- -- -- ef
&c.
This will give you some general notion of the characters of mixed tints
of two colours only, and it is better in practice to confine yourself as
much as possible to these, and to get more complicated colours, either
by putting a third _over_ the first blended tint, or by putting the
third into its interstices. Nothing but watchful practice will teach you
the effects that colours have on each other when thus put over, or
beside, each other.
When you have got a little used to the principal 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 a little turned to
the side of the window, or 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 colours 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 colour," "hill colour,"
"field colour," 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.[239] When you have got the colours of the principal
masses 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.
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 circumstances, 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 colour 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 quantity of purple and grey in
Nature is, by the way, another somewhat surprising subject of discovery.
Well, having ascertained thus your principal 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 grass, &c. 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 spaces. 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 colours, preparing each carefully on your
palatte, and laying it as if it were a patch of coloured 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 grey round them on the light side,
then a (probably greenish) deeper grey on the dark side, varied by
reflected colours, and over all, rich black strips of bark and brown
spots of moss. Lay first the rosy grey, leaving white for the high
lights _and for the spots of moss_, and not touching the dark side. Then
lay the grey for the dark side, fitting it well up to the rosy grey of
the light, leaving also in this darker grey the white paper in the
places for the black and brown moss; then prepare the moss colours
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-glass,
so cunningly must you fit the edges to each other. Finally, take your
background colours, and put them on each side of the tree-trunk, fitting
them carefully to its edge.
Fine work you would make of this, wouldn't you, if you had not learned
to draw first, and could not now draw a good outline for the stem, much
less terminate a colour mass in the outline you wanted?
Your work will look very odd for some time, when you first begin to
paint in this way, and before you can modify it, as I shall tell you
presently how; but never mind; it is of the greatest possible importance
that you should practice this separate laying on of the hues, for all
good colouring finally depends on it. It is, indeed, often necessary,
and sometimes desirable, to lay one colour and form boldly over another:
thus, in laying leaves on blue sky, it is impossible always in large
pictures, or when pressed for time, to fill in the blue through the
interstices of the leaves; and the great Venetians constantly lay their
blue ground first, and then, having let it dry, strike the golden brown
over it in the form of the leaf, leaving the under blue to shine through
the gold, and subdue it to the olive green they want. But in the most
precious and perfect work each leaf is inlaid, and the blue worked round
it: and, whether you use one or other mode of getting your result, it is
equally necessary to be absolute and decisive in your laying the colour.
Either your ground must be laid firmly first, and then your upper colour
struck upon it in perfect form, for ever, thenceforward, unalterable; or
else the two colours must be individually put in their places, and led
up to each other till they meet at their appointed border, equally,
thenceforward, unchangeable. Either process, you see, involves
_absolute_ decision. If you once begin to slur, or change, or sketch, or
try this way and that with your colour, it is all over with it and with
you. You will continually see bad copyists trying to imitate the
Venetians, by daubing their colours about, and retouching, and
finishing, and softening: when every touch and every added hue only lead
them farther into chaos. There is a dog between two children in a
Veronese in the Louvre, which gives the copyist much employment. He has
a dark ground behind him, which Veronese has painted first, and then
when it was dry, or nearly so, struck the locks of the dog's white hair
over it with some half-dozen curling sweeps of his brush, right at once,