24. Get a shilling cake of Prussian blue. Dip the end of it in water so
as to take up a drop, and rub it in a white saucer till you cannot rub
much more, and the color gets dark, thick, and oily-looking. Put two
teaspoonfuls of water to the color you have rubbed down, and mix it well
up with a camel's-hair brush about three quarters of an inch long.
25. Then take a piece of smooth, but not glossy, Bristol board or
pasteboard; divide it, with your pencil and rule, into squares as large
as those of the very largest chess-board: they need not be perfect
squares, only as nearly so as you can quickly guess. Rest the pasteboard
on something sloping as much as an ordinary desk; then, dipping your
brush into the color you have mixed, and taking up as much of the liquid
as it will carry, begin at the top of one of the squares, and lay a pond
or runlet of color along the top edge. Lead this pond of color
gradually downwards, not faster at one place than another, but as if you
were adding a row of bricks to a building, all along (only building down
instead of up), dipping the brush frequently so as to keep the color as
full in that, and in as great quantity on the paper, as you can, so only
that it does not run down anywhere in a little stream. But if it should,
never mind; go on quietly with your square till you have covered it all
in. When you get to the bottom, the color will lodge there in a great
wave. Have ready a piece of blotting-paper; dry your brush on it, and
with the dry brush take up the superfluous color as you would with a
sponge, till it all looks even.
26. In leading the color down, you will find your brush continually go
over the edge of the square, or leave little gaps within it. Do not
endeavor to retouch these, nor take much care about them; the great
thing is to get the color to lie smoothly where it reaches, not in
alternate blots and pale patches; try, therefore, to lead it over the
square as fast as possible, with such attention to your limit as you are
able to give. The use of the exercise is, indeed, to enable you finally
to strike the color up to the limit with perfect accuracy; but the first
thing is to get it even,--the power of rightly striking the edge comes
only by time and practice: even the greatest artists rarely can do this
quite perfectly.
27. When you have done one square, proceed to do another which does not
communicate with it. When you have thus done all the alternate squares,
as on a chess-board, turn the pasteboard upside down, begin again with
the first, and put another coat over it, and so on over all the others.
The use of turning the paper upside down is to neutralize the increase
of darkness towards the bottom of the squares, which would otherwise
take place from the ponding of the color.
28. Be resolved to use blotting-paper, or a piece of rag, instead of
your lips, to dry the brush. The habit of doing so, once acquired, will
save you from much partial poisoning. Take care, however, always to draw
the brush from root to point, otherwise you will spoil it. You may even
wipe it as you would a pen when you want it very dry, without doing
harm, provided you do not crush it upwards. Get a good brush at first,
and cherish it; it will serve you longer and better than many bad ones.
29. When you have done the squares all over again, do them a third time,
always trying to keep your edges as neat as possible. When your color is
exhausted, mix more in the same proportions, two teaspoonfuls to as much
as you can grind with a drop; and when you have done the alternate
squares three times over, as the paper will be getting very damp, and
dry more slowly, begin on the white squares, and bring them up to the
same tint in the same way. The amount of jagged dark line which then
will mark the limits of the squares will be the exact measure of your
unskillfulness.
30. As soon as you tire of squares draw circles (with compasses); and
then draw straight lines irregularly across circles, and fill up the
spaces so produced between the straight line and the circumference; and
then draw any simple shapes of leaves, according to the exercise No.
II., and fill up those, until you can lay on color quite evenly in any
shape you want.
31. You will find in the course of this practice, as you cannot always
put exactly the same quantity of water to the color, that the darker the
color is, the more difficult it becomes to lay it on evenly. Therefore,
when you have gained some definite degree of power, try to fill in the
forms required with a full brush, and a dark tint, at once, instead of
laying several coats one over another; always taking care that the tint,
however dark, be quite liquid; and that, after being laid on, so much of
it is absorbed as to prevent its forming a black line at the edge as it
dries. A little experience will teach you how apt the color is to do
this, and how to prevent it; not that it needs always to be prevented,
for a great master in water-colors will sometimes draw a firm outline,
when he _wants_ one, simply by letting the color dry in this way at the
edge.
32. When, however, you begin to cover complicated forms with the darker
color, no rapidity will prevent the tint from drying irregularly as it
is led on from part to part. You will then find the following method
useful. Lay in the color very pale and liquid; so pale, indeed, that you
can only just see where it is on the paper. Lead it up to all the
outlines, and make it precise in form, keeping it thoroughly wet
everywhere. Then, when it is all in shape, take the darker color, and
lay some of it _into_ the middle of the liquid color. It will spread
gradually in a branchy kind of way, and you may now lead it up to the
outlines already determined, and play it with the brush till it fills
its place well; then let it dry, and it will be as flat and pure as a
single dash, yet defining all the complicated forms accurately.
33. Having thus obtained the power of laying on a tolerably flat tint,
you must try to lay on a gradated one. Prepare the color with three or
four teaspoonfuls of water; then, when it is mixed, pour away about
two-thirds of it, keeping a teaspoonful of pale color. Sloping your
paper as before, draw two pencil lines all the way down, leaving a space
between them of the width of a square on your chess-board. Begin at the
top of your paper, between the lines; and having struck on the first
brushful of color, and led it down a little, dip your brush deep in
water, and mix up the color on the plate quickly with as much more water
as the brush takes up at that one dip: then, with this paler color, lead
the tint farther down. Dip in water again, mix the color again, and thus
lead down the tint, always dipping in water once between each
replenishing of the brush, and stirring the color on the plate well, but
as quickly as you can. Go on until the color 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.
34. If you get to the bottom of your paper before your color 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 color, and go down in the same way. Then
again, and then again, and so continually until the color 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.
35. 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.
36. As you get more power, and can strike the color more quickly down,
you will be able to gradate in less compass;[7] beginning with a small
quantity of color, 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 color to shade as far as
is necessary for your immediate progress, which is to be done thus:--
37. 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.[8] Cut a narrow
slip, all the way down, of each gradated color, 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, etc. 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 color, if you
can match their color by any compartment of the crimson or blue in your
scales, the gray in the compartment of the gray scale marked with the
same number is the gray which must represent that crimson or blue in
your light and shade drawing.
38. Next, prepare scales with gamboge, cobalt, and vermilion. You will
find that you cannot darken these beyond a certain point;[9] 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
colors. Then, supposing your scales properly gradated and equally
divided, the compartment or degree No. 1 of the gray will represent in
chiaroscuro the No. 1 of all the other colors; No. 2 of gray the No. 2
of the other colors, and so on.
39. 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 colors 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 gray, you will soon be able to arrive shrewdly at an
approximation by a glance of the eye, without any measuring scale at
all.
40. 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
tortoiseshell, spots in surfaces of shells, etc., as tenderly as you
can, in the darknesses that correspond to their colors; and when you
find you can do this successfully, it is time to begin rounding.