20. 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 hurt 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 gray, or dull white. A wholly gray or rainy
day is the best for this practice.
21. 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,[6] 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 endeavored to represent the pencil shading within
the outline, as I could not easily express it in a wood-cut; and you
have nothing to do at present with the indication of 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.
[Illustration: FIG. 4.]
22. 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 color, one upon another; as
patterns on any kind of cloth, or flat china (tiles, for instance),
executed in two colors 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 color by depth of shade. Thus a pattern of
ultramarine blue will have to be represented by a darker tint of gray
than a pattern of yellow.
23. 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 color which you will want. If you
can, by any means, get acquainted with any ordinary skillful water-color
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 color, 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-color is laid on by a workman of
any kind, the following directions will help you:--