for the beginner to do (especially if he cannot command his own
choice of process-engraver) are perfectly legitimate to the practised
artist who has studied process work. The student should not be at
first encouraged to make experiments in diluted inks or retained
pencil-marks, or any of those delightful practices by which one who is
thoroughly conversant with photographic processes and pen-drawing
varies the monotony of his medium. He should begin by making his
drawings as simply as he can, so that they express his subject. And
this simplicity, this quality of suggestion, is the true field of
pen-work. The best work is reticent and sober, giving the greatest
number of essential facts in the fewest strokes. If you can express a
fact with sufficient intelligibility in half a dozen pen strokes, it is
inartistic and inexpedient to worry it into any number of scratches.
This is often done because the public likes to see that there has
been plenty of manual labour put into the work it buys. It is greatly
impressed with the knowledge that any particular drawing took days to
complete, and it respects that drawing accordingly, and has nothing
but contempt for a sketch which may have taken only an hour or so,
although the first may be artless and overloaded with unnecessary
detail, and the second instinct with actuality and suggestion. But if
you are drawing a landscape with a pen, that is no reason for putting
in an elaborate foreground of grass, carefully working up each square
inch. Such a subject can be rendered by a master in a few strokes, and
though, possibly, you may never equal the artistry of the master, you
can follow his ideals. Another and allied point in pen-and-ink art is
its adaptability to what is termed “selection.” You have, say, before
you the view or object to be drawn. You do not need to make a drawing
in which you shall niggle up every part of it, but you select (the
trained eye readily does this) its salient feature and emphasize it
and make it fall properly into the composition, leaving aught else
either suggested or less thoroughly treated. Here is a pen-drawing
made with a very special regard to a selection only of the essential.
_The Gatehouse, Moynes Court_, is a singular structure near the shore
of the Severn estuary, two miles below Chepstow. The singularity of
its design, rarely paralleled in England, would give the artist the
motive for sketching, and its tapering lines and curious roofs are
best preserved in a drawing that deals chiefly in outline, and has
but little shading wherewith to confuse the queer profile of these
effective towers. This drawing was reproduced by the bitumen process.
The lines in the foreground, suggestive of grass, were drawn in pencil.
The pen-sketches and studies of the foremost artists which have been
made, not for publication, but for practice, but which have sometimes
been reproduced, as, for instance, some slight sketches of Charles
Keene’s, delight the artist’s eye simply by reason of their suggestive
and selective qualities. If you do not delight in these things,
but have a desire to (as the untaught public might say) “see them
finished,” then it seems likely either that you have not the artistic
sense, or else you have not sufficient training; but I should suspect
you were in the first category, and should then advise you to leave
matters artistic alone.
[Illustration: 7¼ × 9. THE GATEHOUSE, MOYNES COURT.
_Bitumen process. Drawing showing value of selection._]
You should not forget that in drawing for reproduction you are not
working like the painter of a picture. The painter’s picture exists
for its own sake, not, like a pen or wash drawing, as only the means
to an end. The end of these drawings is illustration, and when this is
frankly acknowledged, no one has any right to criticize the neatness or
untidiness of the means, so long as the end is kept properly in view.
We have not yet arrived at that stage of civilization when
black-and-white art shall be appreciated as fully as colour. When we
have won to that pinnacle of culture, then perhaps an original drawing
in pen or monochrome will be cherished for its own sake; at present
we are barbaric more than enough, and bright hues attract us only in
lesser degree than our “friend and brother,” Quashee from the Congo.
How nearly related we are these preferences may show more readily than
the ranter’s impassioned oratory. As a drawing made for reproduction
is only a stage on the way to the printed illustration, and is not
the cynosure of collectors, it is successful or unsuccessful only
in so far as it subserves this purpose. There is really no need for
scrupulous neatness in the original; there is no necessity for it to
have the appearance of a finished picture or of delicate execution, so
only it will wear this appearance when reduced. That curious bugbear
of neatness causes want of breadth and vigour, and is the cause of
most of the tight and trammelled handling we see. Draughtsmen at the
outset of their career are too much afraid of their mediums of white
cardboard and ink, and too scrupulous in submitting their original
drawings, beautifully cleaned up and trimmed round, to editors who, if
they know their business, give no better consideration to them on that
account. Mr. Ruskin has written, in his _Elements of Drawing_, some
most misleading things with regard to drawing with the pen. True, his
book was written in the ’50’s, before pen-drawing became an art, but it
has been repeatedly reprinted even so lately as 1893, and consequently
it is still actively dangerous. “Coarse art,” _i.e._ bold work, says
Mr. Ruskin—he is speaking of pen-drawing—“is always bad art.” There
you see Mr. Ruskin holding a brief for the British public which admires
the ineffable artistry displayed in writing the Lord’s Prayer on a
threepenny piece, but deplores the immorality shown in drawings done
with a quill pen. The art of a pen-drawing is _not_ to be calculated
on a sliding-scale graduated to microscopical fractions of an inch and
applied to its individual strokes.
The appearance a drawing will present when reduced may be approximately
judged by the use of a “diminishing glass,” that is to say, a concave
glass.
Drawings should not be cleaned up with india-rubber, which destroys the
surface of paper or cardboard and renders lines rotten; bread should
be used, preferably stale bread two days old, crumbled and rubbed over
the drawing with the palm of the hand. Mr. Ruskin says that in this way
“you waste the good bread, which is wrong;” but you had better use a
handful of “the good bread” in this way than injure a good drawing.
The copying of wood engravings or steel prints, not for their subjects,
but for their peculiar _techniques_, is a vicious and inartistic
practice. Time used in this way is time wasted, and worse than wasted,
because this practice is utterly at variance with the spirit of
pen-work.
It is not a proof of artistry or consummate draughtsmanship to be able
to draw a straight line or a perfect circle, the absurd legend of
Giotto and his circle notwithstanding.
There are many labour-saving tricks in drawing for reproduction, but
these have usually little connection with the purely artistic side
of illustration. They have been devised chiefly to aid the new race
of artist-journalists in drawing for the papers which cater for that
well-known desire of the public to see its news illustrated hot and
hot. Most of these methods and the larger proportion of the men who
practice them are frankly journalistic, but some few draughtsmen have
succeeded in resolving this sleight of hand into novel and interesting
styles, and their hurried work has achieved a value all its own,
scarcely legitimate, but aggressive and clamouring for attention.
One of these tricks in illustration is a method which is largely
practised for journalistic illustration in America—drawing in pen and
ink upon photographs, which are afterwards bleached out, the outline
drawings remaining to be processed. Although not a desirable practice
from an artistic point of view, it is advantageously used for news work
or upon any occasion in which expedition is essential. The photograph
to be treated in this way is printed by the usual silver-print method,
with the exception that the paper used is somewhat differently
prepared. What is known as “plain salted paper” is used; that is
to say, paper prepared without the albumen which gives to ordinary
silver-prints their smooth, shiny appearance. The paper is prepared by
being soaked in a solution made by the following formula:—
Chlorate of ammonia 100 grains.
Gelatine 10 "
Water 10 ounces.
The print is made and fixed without toning. It may now be drawn upon
with pen and Indian ink. The ink should be perfectly black and fixed.
The drawing, if it is to be worth anything artistically, must not aim
at anything like the fulness of detail which the photograph possesses.
An outline drawing is readily made in this way, and a considerable
amount of detail may be achieved. Indeed, the temptation is always to
go over the photograph in pen and ink too fully, and only draughtsmen
of accomplishment can resist this almost irresistible inducement to do
too much. Still, admirable results have been obtained in this way by
artists who know and practise the very great virtue of reticence.
When the drawing has been finished it is immersed in a solution of
bichlorate of mercury dissolved in alcohol, which removes all traces of
the photograph, leaving the drawing showing uninjured upon plain white
paper. Omissions from the drawing may now be supplied and corrections
made, and it is now ready for being processed. If very serious
omissions are noticed, the photograph may be conjured back by immersing
the paper in a solution of hyposulphite of soda.
Another and readier way is to draw upon photographs printed on
ferro-prussiate paper. This paper may be purchased at any good
photographic materials shop, or it can be prepared by brushing a sheet
of paper over with a sensitizing solution composed of the two following
solutions, A and B, prepared separately and then mixed in equal
volumes:—
A { Citrate of iron and ammonia 1⅞ ounces.
{ Water 8 "
B { Ferricyanide of potassium 1¼ "
{ Water 8 "
The paper must be prepared thus in a dark room and quickly dried. It
will remain in good condition for three or four months, and is best
preserved in a calcium tube. Prints made upon ferro-prussiate paper are
formed in Prussian blue, and are fixed in the simplest way, on being
taken from the printing frame, by washing in cold water.
An Indian ink drawing may now be made upon this blue photographic
print, and sent for process without the necessity of bleaching, because
blue will not reproduce. If, on the other hand, it is desired to see
the drawing as black lines upon white paper, the blue print may be
bleached out in a few seconds by immersing it in a dish of water in
which a small piece of what chemists call carbonate of soda (common
washing soda) has been dissolved.
Outline drawings for reproduction by process may be made upon
tracing-paper. Most of the rough illustrations and portrait sketches
printed in the morning and evening newspapers are tracings made in
this way from photographs or from other more elaborate illustrations.
Although this is not at all a dignified branch of art, yet some of the
little portrait heads that appear from time to time in the _St. James’s
Gazette_, _Pall Mall Gazette_, and the _Westminster Gazette_ are models
of selection and due economy of line, calculated to give all the
essentials of portraiture, while having due regard to the exigencies of
the newspaper printing press.
[Illustration]
The two outline portrait sketches shown here are reproduced from the
_St. James’s Gazette_. Their thick lines have a tendency to become
offensive when subjected to careful book-printing, but appearing as
they originally did in the rapidly printed editions of an evening
paper, this emphasis of line was exactly suited to the occasion.
[Illustration]
Translucent white tracing-paper should be used for tracing purposes,
pinned securely through the corners of the photograph or drawing to be
copied in this manner on to a drawing-board, so that the tracing may
not be shifted while in progress. No pencilling is necessary, but the
tracing should be made in ink, straight away. Fixed Indian ink should
be used, because when the tracing is finished it will be necessary for
process purposes to paste it upon cardboard, and, tracing-paper being
so thin, the moisture penetrates, and would smudge a drawing made in
soluble inks unless the very greatest care was taken. Old tracing-paper
which has turned a yellow colour should on no account be used, and
tracing-cloth is rarely available, because, although beautifully
transparent, it is generally too greasy for pure line-work.
Pen-drawings which are to be made and reproduced for the newspaper
press at the utmost speed are made upon lithographic transfer paper
in lithographic ink, a stubborn and difficult material of a fatty
nature. Drawings made in this way are not photographed, but transferred
direct to the zinc plate, and etched in a very short space of time. No
reduction in scale is possible, and the original drawing is inevitably
destroyed in the process of transferring.
WASH DRAWINGS.
Wash drawings for reproduction by half-tone process should be made upon
smooth or finely grained cardboards. Reeves’ London board is very good
for the purpose, and so is a French board they keep, stamped in the
corner of each sheet with the initials A. L. in a circle. Wash drawings
should be made in different gradations of the same colour if a good
result is to be expected: thus a wash drawing in lampblack should be
executed only in shades of lampblack, and not varied by the use of
sepia in some parts, or of Payne’s grey in others. Lampblack is a
favourite material, and excellent from the photographic point of view.
Payne’s grey, or neutral tint, at one time had a great vogue, but it is
too blue in all its shades for altogether satisfactory reproduction,
although the illustration, _The Houses of Parliament_, shown on p.
122, has come well with its use. Chinese white was freely used in the
drawing, and its value is shown in putting in the swirls of fog.
[Illustration: 11½ × 17½. THE HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT AT NIGHT, FROM THE
RIVER.
_Wash drawing in Payne’s grey. Half-tone process, medium grain._]
[Illustration: 5¾ × 3¾. VICTORIA EMBANKMENT NEAR BLACKFRIARS BRIDGE: A
FOGGY NIGHT.
_Drawing on paper in charcoal-grey, lights put in with Chinese white.
Medium grain._]
Indian ink is capable of producing the greatest range of tone from
light to dark, and successive washes with it are quite indelible. But
it may be said at once that this great range is not necessary—nay,
is not advisable in drawing for half-tone reproduction. In view of
the unavoidable defects of the half-tone processes which tend to
flatten out the picture, artists should not attempt many and delicate
gradations. Half a dozen tones from black to white will generally
suffice. Any attempt to secure the thousand-and-one gradations of a
photograph will be at once needless and harmful.
Pure transparent water-colour washes do not give such good effects
in reproduction as work in body-colour. Chinese white mixed with
lampblack comes beautifully. Charcoal-grey, of recent introduction,
is not so well adapted to the admixture of body-colour. Altogether,
charcoal-grey, although a very admirable colour, is a difficult
material unless you know exactly at starting a drawing what you intend
to do. The illustration, _Victoria Embankment: a Foggy Night_, was made
in it on rough paper. The nature of the subject rendered the execution
of the drawing easy, but in a drawing which runs the whole gamut of
tone, its unstable qualities forbid its use by the novice.
[Illustration: 13 × 10. CORFE RAILWAY STATION.
_Drawing upon common rough scribbling paper in Indian ink, washes
reinforced by pencil lines. Fine grain._]
[Illustration: 10½ × 6½. THE AMBULATORY, DORE ABBEY.
_Photograph painted in parts with body-colour._]
The drawings made in wash by Myrbach and Rossi have set the fashion for
much recent illustration. Vignettes made with a full brush and reduced
to infinitesimal proportions have abounded since the illustrated
editions of _Tartarin of Tarascon_ first charmed the eye; but now,
reduced to the common denominator of the sixpenny magazines, they
have lost all the qualities and retained all the defects the fashion
ever had. The drawing of _Corfe Railway Station_ was made in washes
of Indian ink with a full brush, each successive wash left to dry
thoroughly before the next was laid on. Parts are reinforced with
pencil strokes: these can readily be identified in the print. The block
was then vignetted.
Another method is used for half-tone work. A photograph is mounted upon
cardboard, and may be worked upon in brushwork with body-colour to any
extent, either for lightening the picture or for making it darker. For
working upon the ordinary silver-print an admixture of ox-gall must be
used or the pigments will not “take” upon the sensitized paper.[1]
The illustration, _The Ambulatory, Dore Abbey_, is from a photograph,
worked upon in this manner. The photo was so dark and indefinite that
something was necessary to be done to show the springing of the arches
and the relation of one pier to another. Chinese white was used in the
manner described above, and the arches outlined in places by scratching
with the sharp point of a penknife.
[1] Refer to _The Real Japan_, by Henry Norman. Fisher Unwin, 1892. The
book is freely illustrated with half-tone blocks made from photographs.
The photographs were all extensively worked upon with body-colour in
this manner. Indeed, the brushwork may clearly be discerned in the
reproductions.
Tinted cards may be used in drawing for half-tone, but yellow tints
must be avoided, for obvious photographic reasons; and blue tints,
photographically, are practically pure white. If tinted cardboard is
used at all, it should be in tints of grey or brown.
[Illustration: 14 × 12. MOONLIGHT: CONFLUENCE OF THE SEVERN AND THE WYE.
_Oil sketch on canvas in Payne’s grey. Half-tone process. Fine
grain._]
A very satisfactory way of working for half-tone is to work in oil
monochrome. The reproductions from oil sketches come very well indeed
by half-tone processes: full and vigorous. The photo-engraver always
objects to oil because of its gloss, but this can be obviated by
mixing your colour with turpentine or benzine, which give a dull
surface. The sketch shown on p. 130 was made in this way. It was a
smoothly worked sketch, with no aggressive brush-marks, but it may be
noted that brush-marks come beautifully by this process: if anything,
rather stronger than in the original, because the shadows cast by them
reproduce as well. But if you sketch in oils for reproduction, be chary
of vigorous brushwork in white: it comes unpleasantly prominent in the
block.
In giving instructions for the reproduction, and reduction, of
drawings, the measurement in one direction of the reproduction desired
should be plainly indicated thus: ← 4½ inches →. Unless absolutely
unavoidable, drawings should not be sent marked “½ size,” “⅓ scale,”
and so on, because these terms are apt to mislead. People not
accustomed to measurements are very uncertain in their understanding of
them, and, absurd as it may seem to those who deal in mensuration, they
very frequently take ½ scale and ½ size as synonymous terms; while ½
scale is really ¼ size, and so on, in proportion.
[Illustration]
The proportions a drawing will assume when reduced may be ascertained
in this way. You have, say, a narrow upright drawing, as shown in the
above diagram, and you want the width reduced to a certain measurement,
but having marked this off are at a loss to know what height the
reproduction will be. Supposing it to be a pen-drawing, vignetted, as
most pen-drawings are; in the first place, light pencil lines touching
the farthest projections of the drawing should be ruled to each of its
four sides, meeting accurately at the angles A, B, C, D. This frame
being made, a diagonal line should be lightly ruled from upper to lower
corner, either—as shown—from B to C, or from A to D. The measurement
of the proposed reduction should then be marked off upon the base line
at E, and a perpendicular line ruled from it to meet the diagonal. The
point of contact, F, gives the height that was to be found, and a
horizontal line from F to G completes the diagram, and gives the
correct proportions of the block to be made.
It will readily be seen that large copies of small sketches can be made
in exact proportions by a further application of the diagonal, but care
should be taken to have all these lines drawn scrupulously accurate,
because the slightest deviation throws the proportions all out.
STYLES AND MANNER.
Pen-drawing is ruled by expediency more, perhaps, than any art. I shall
not say that one method is more right than another in the management of
textures, or in the elaboration or mere suggestion of detail, for line
work is, to begin with, a purely arbitrary rendering of tones. There
is nothing like line in nature. Take up an isolated brick; it does not
suggest line in any way. Build it up with others into a wall, and you
can in pen and ink render that wall in many ways that will be equally
convincing and right. It may be expressed in terms of splatter-work,
which can be made to represent admirably a wall where the bricks have
become welded into an homogeneous mass, individually indistinguishable
by age, or of vertical or horizontal lines that may or may not take
account of each individual brick and the joints of the mortar that
binds the courses together. Crosshatching, though a cheap expedient
and a decaying convention, may be used. But to lose sight of ordinary
atmospheric conditions is no more privileged in pen-work than in
paint. This is not by any means unnecessary or untimely advice,
though it should be. The fact of using a pen instead of a brush does
not empower anybody to play tricks with the solar system, though one
sees it constantly done. One continually sees in pen-drawing the laws
of light and shade set at naught, and nobody says anything against
it—perhaps it looks smart. Certainly the effect is novel, and novelty
is a powerful factor in anything. But to draw a wall shining with a
strong diffused light which throws a great black shadow, is contrary
to art and nature both. “Nature,” according to Mr. Whistler, “may be
‘creeping up,’ but she has not reached that point yet. When one sees
suns setting behind the east ends of cathedrals, with other vagaries
of that sort, one simply classes such things with that amusing erratum
of Mr. Rider Haggard’s, in which he describes a ship ‘steaming out of
the mouth of the Thames, shaping her course toward the red ball of the
setting sun.’” But though the instance is amusing, the custom is apt to
pall.
Some of the American pen-draughtsmen who contribute to the _Century_
are exceedingly clever, and their handling extremely personal; but
after a time this excessive personality ceases to charm, and, for one
thing, these young bloods are curiously narrow in their choice of the
masters from whom they are only too pleased to derive. Mr. Brennan is,
perhaps, the most curiously original of these men. He is the man who
has shown most convincingly that the inked thumb is the most instant
and effective instrument wherewith to render velvet in a pen-drawing.
You cannot fail to be struck with his method; his manner is entirely
personal, and yet, after a time, it worries one into intolerance.
It is the same with that convention, founded, apparently, by Mr.
Herbert Railton, which has had a long run of some nine or ten years.
It was a convention in pictorial architecture that had nothing except
a remarkably novel technique to recommend it. The illustrator invited
us rather to see how “pretty” he could render an old building, than how
nearly he could show it us as it stood. He could draw an elevation in
a manner curiously feminine, but he could only repeat himself and his
trees; his landscapes were insults to the imagination. Nothing inspired
him to achievements beyond pictorial confectionery.