152. MY DEAR READER,--If you have been obedient, and have hitherto done
all that I have told you, I trust it has not been without much subdued
remonstrance, and some serious vexation. For I should be sorry if, when
you were led by the course of your study to observe closely such things
as are beautiful in color, you had not longed to paint them, and felt
considerable difficulty in complying with your restriction to the use of
black, or blue, or gray. You _ought_ to love color, and to think nothing
quite beautiful or perfect without it; and if you really do love it, for
its own sake, and are not merely desirous to color because you think
painting a finer thing than drawing, there is some chance you may color
well. Nevertheless, you need not hope ever to produce anything more than
pleasant helps to memory, or useful and suggestive sketches in color,
unless you mean to be wholly an artist. You may, in the time which other
vocations leave at your disposal, produce finished, beautiful, and
masterly drawings in light and shade. But to color well, requires your
life. It cannot be done cheaper. The difficulty of doing right is
increased--not twofold nor threefold, but a thousandfold, and more--by
the addition of color to your work. For the chances are more than a
thousand to one against your being right both in form and color with a
given touch: it is difficult enough to be right in form, if you attend
to that only; but when you have to attend, at the same moment, to a much
more subtle thing than the form, the difficulty is strangely
increased,--and multiplied almost to infinity by this great fact, that,
while form is absolute, so that you can say at the moment you draw any
line that it is either right or wrong, color is wholly _relative_. Every
hue throughout your work is altered by every touch that you add in other
places; so that what was warm a minute ago, becomes cold when you have
put a hotter color in another place, and what was in harmony when you
left it, becomes discordant as you set other colors beside it; so that
every touch must be laid, not with a view to its effect at the time, but
with a view to its effect in futurity, the result upon it of all that is
afterwards to be done being previously considered. You may easily
understand that, this being so, nothing but the devotion of life, and
great genius besides, can make a colorist.
153. But though you cannot produce finished colored drawings of any
value, you may give yourself much pleasure, and be of great use to other
people, by occasionally sketching with a view to color only; and
preserving distinct statements of certain color facts--as that the
harvest moon at rising was of such and such a red, and surrounded by
clouds of such and such a rosy gray; that the mountains at evening were
in truth so deep in purple; and the waves by the boat's side were indeed
of that incredible green. This only, observe, if you have an eye for
color; but you may presume that you have this, if you enjoy color.
154. And, though of course you should always give as much form to your
subject as your attention to its color will admit of, remember that the
whole value of what you are about depends, in a colored sketch, on the
color merely. If the color is wrong, everything is wrong: just as, if
you are singing, and sing false notes, it does not matter how true the
words are. If you sing at all, you must sing sweetly; and if you color
at all, you must color rightly. Give up all the form, rather than the
slightest part of the color: just as, if you felt yourself in danger of
a false note, you would give up the word, and sing a meaningless sound,
if you felt that so you could save the note. Never mind though your
houses are all tumbling down,--though your clouds are mere blots, and
your trees mere knobs, and your sun and moon like crooked
sixpences,--so only that trees, clouds, houses, and sun or moon, are of
the right colors. Of course, the discipline you have gone through will
enable you to hint something of form, even in the fastest sweep of the
brush; but do not let the thought of form hamper you in the least, when
you begin to make colored memoranda. If you want the form of the
subject, draw it in black and white. If you want its color, take its
color, and be sure you _have_ it, and not a spurious, treacherous,
half-measured piece of mutual concession, with the colors all wrong, and
the forms still anything but right. It is best to get into the habit of
considering the colored work merely as supplementary to your other
studies; making your careful drawings of the subject first, and then a
colored memorandum separately, as shapeless as you like, but faithful in
hue, and entirely minding its own business. This principle, however,
bears chiefly on large and distant subjects: in foregrounds and near
studies, the color cannot be had without a good deal of definition of
form. For if you do not map the mosses on the stones accurately, you
will not have the right quantity of color in each bit of moss pattern,
and then none of the colors will look right; but it always simplifies
the work much if you are clear as to your point of aim, and satisfied,
when necessary, to fail of all but that.
155. Now, of course, if I were to enter into detail respecting coloring,
which is the beginning and end of a painter's craft, I should need to
make this a work in three volumes instead of three letters, and to
illustrate it in the costliest way. I only hope, at present, to set you
pleasantly and profitably to work, leaving you, within the tethering of
certain leading-strings, to gather what advantages you can from the
works of art of which every year brings a greater number within your
reach;--and from the instruction which, every year, our rising artists
will be more ready to give kindly, and better able to give wisely.
156. And, first, of materials. Use hard cake colors, not moist colors:
grind a sufficient quantity of each on your palette every morning,
keeping a separate plate, large and deep, for colors to be used in
broad washes, and wash both plate and palette every evening, so as to be
able always to get good and pure color when you need it; and force
yourself into cleanly and orderly habits about your colors. The two best
colorists of modern times, Turner and Rossetti,[41] afford us, I am
sorry to say, no confirmation of this precept by their practice. Turner
was, and Rossetti is, as slovenly in all their procedures as men can
well be; but the result of this was, with Turner, that the colors have
altered in all his pictures, and in many of his drawings; and the result
of it with Rossetti is, that though his colors are safe, he has
sometimes to throw aside work that was half done, and begin over again.
William Hunt, of the Old Water-color, is very neat in his practice; so,
I believe, is Mulready; so is John Lewis; and so are the leading
Pre-Raphaelites, Rossetti only excepted. And there can be no doubt about
the goodness of the advice, if it were only for this reason, that the
more particular you are about your colors the more you will get into a
deliberate and methodical habit in using them, and all true speed in
coloring comes of this deliberation.
157. Use Chinese white, well ground, to mix with your colors in order to
pale them, instead of a quantity of water. You will thus be able to
shape your masses more quietly, and play the colors about with more
ease; they will not damp your paper so much, and you will be able to go
on continually, and lay forms of passing cloud and other fugitive or
delicately shaped lights, otherwise unattainable except by time.
158. This mixing of white with the pigments, so as to render them
opaque, constitutes body-color drawing as opposed to transparent-color
drawing, and you will, perhaps, have it often said to you that this
body-color is "illegitimate." It is just as legitimate as oil-painting,
being, so far as handling is concerned, the same process, only without
its uncleanliness, its unwholesomeness, or its inconvenience; for oil
will not dry quickly, nor carry safely, nor give the same effects of
atmosphere without tenfold labor. And if you hear it said that the
body-color looks chalky or opaque, and, as is very likely, think so
yourself, be yet assured of this, that though certain effects of glow
and transparencies of gloom are not to be reached without transparent
color, those glows and glooms are _not_ the noblest aim of art. After
many years' study of the various results of fresco and oil painting in
Italy, and of body-color and transparent color in England, I am now
entirely convinced that the greatest things that are to be done in art
must be done in dead color. The habit of depending on varnish or on
lucid tints for transparency, makes the painter comparatively lose sight
of the nobler translucence which is obtained by breaking various colors
amidst each other: and even when, as by Correggio, exquisite play of hue
is joined with exquisite transparency, the delight in the depth almost
always leads the painter into mean and false chiaroscuro; it leads him
to like dark backgrounds instead of luminous ones,[42] and to enjoy, in
general, quality of color more than grandeur of composition, and
confined light rather than open sunshine: so that the really greatest
thoughts of the greatest men have always, so far as I remember, been
reached in dead color, and the noblest oil pictures of Tintoret and
Veronese are those which are likest frescoes.
159. Besides all this, the fact is, that though sometimes a little
chalky and coarse-looking body-color is, in a sketch, infinitely liker
Nature than transparent color: the bloom and mist of distance are
accurately and instantly represented by the film of opaque blue (_quite_
accurately, I think, by nothing else); and for ground, rocks, and
buildings, the earthy and solid surface is, of course, always truer than
the most finished and carefully wrought work in transparent tints can
ever be.
160. Against one thing, however, I must steadily caution you. All kinds
of color 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 color 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 color 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 color; 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 re-enforce 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.
161. The drawing in body-color 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-color school of art. There are sometimes
places in which a skillful artist will roughen his paper a little to get
certain conditions of dusty color with more ease than he could
otherwise; and sometimes a skillfully rased piece of paper will, in the
midst of transparent tints, answer nearly the purpose of chalky
body-color in representing the surfaces of rocks or building. 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 gray paper as smooth as silk;[43] and never disturb the surface of
your color or paper, except finally to scratch out the very highest
lights if you are using transparent colors.
162. I have said above that body-color drawing will teach you the use of
color 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-color 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-color showing through the blue cloud-color, 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 color, from the warm tint's showing through
and between the particles of the other. When it is dry, you may add a
little color 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 colors 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.[44]
163. This discussion of the relative merits of transparent and opaque
color 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 colors named in the note below[45] and try experiments
on their simple combinations, by mixing each color 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 colors in columns at the top and side; the
mixed tints being given at the intersections, thus (the letters standing
for colors):
b c d e f etc.
a a b a c a d a e a f
b -- b c b d b e b f
c -- -- c d c e c f
d -- -- -- d e d f
e -- -- -- -- e f
etc.
This will give you some general notion of the characters of mixed tints
of two colors only, and it is better in practice to confine yourself as
much as possible to these, and to get more complicated colors, either by
putting the third _over_ the first blended tint, or by putting the third
into its interstices. Nothing but watchful practice will teach you the
effects that colors have on each other when thus put over, or beside,
each other.
164. 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 to the side of the window, or a little turned, 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 colors 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 color," "hill color," "field color," 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.[46] When you have got the
colors 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.
[Illustration: FIG. 29.]
165. 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 color 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 gray in Nature is,
by the way, another somewhat surprising subject of discovery.
166. 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, etc. 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 colors, preparing each
carefully on your palette, and laying it as if it were a patch of
colored 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 gray round them on the
light side, then a (probably greenish) deeper gray on the dark side,
varied by reflected colors, and, over all, rich black strips of bark and
brown spots of moss. Lay first the rosy gray, leaving white for the high
lights _and for the spots of moss_, and not touching the dark side. Then
lay the gray for the dark side, fitting it well up to the rosy gray of
the light, leaving also in this darker gray the white paper in the
places for the black and brown moss; then prepare the moss colors
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 colors, and put them on each side of the tree trunk, fitting
them carefully to its edge.
167. 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 color 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 coloring finally depends on it. It is, indeed, often necessary, and
sometimes desirable, to lay one color 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 color.
Either your ground must be laid firmly first, and then your upper color
struck upon it in perfect form, forever, thenceforward, unalterable; or
else the two colors 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 color, it is all over with it and with you. You
will continually see bad copyists trying to imitate the Venetians, by
daubing their colors 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 copyists 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, and forever. Had
one line or hair of them gone wrong, it would have been wrong forever;
no retouching could have mended it. The poor copyists daub in first some
background, and then some dog's hair; then retouch the background, then
the hair; work for hours at it, expecting it always to come right
to-morrow--"when it is finished." They _may_ work for centuries at it,
and they will never do it. If they can do it with Veronese's allowance
of work, half a dozen sweeps of the hand over the dark background, well;
if not, they may ask the dog himself whether it will ever come right,
and get true answer from him--on Launce's conditions: "If he say 'ay,'
it will; if he say 'no,' it will; if he shake his tail and say nothing,
it will."
168. (3.) Whenever you lay on a mass of color, be sure that however
large it may be, or however small, it shall be gradated. No color exists
in Nature under ordinary circumstances without gradation. If you do not
see this, it is the fault of your inexperience: you will see it in due
time, if you practice enough. But in general you may see it at once. In
the birch trunk, for instance, the rosy gray _must_ be gradated by the
roundness of the stem till it meets the shaded side; similarly the
shaded side is gradated by reflected light. Accordingly, whether by
adding water, or white paint, or by unequal force of touch (this you
will do at pleasure, according to the texture you wish to produce), you
must, in every tint you lay on, make it a little paler at one part than
another, and get an even gradation between the two depths. This is very
like laying down a formal law or recipe for you; but you will find it is
merely the assertion of a natural fact. It is not indeed physically
impossible to meet with an ungradated piece of color, but it is so
supremely improbable, that you had better get into the habit of asking
yourself invariably, when you are going to copy a tint--not "Is that
gradated?" but "Which way is that gradated?" and at least in ninety-nine
out of a hundred instances, you will be able to answer decisively after
a careful glance, though the gradation may have been so subtle that you
did not see it at first. And it does not matter how small the touch of
color may be, though not larger than the smallest pin's head, if one
part of it is not darker than the rest, it is a bad touch; for it is not
merely because the natural fact is so, that your color should be
gradated; the preciousness and pleasantness of the color itself depends
more on this than on any other of its qualities, for gradation is to
colors just what curvature is to lines, both being felt to be beautiful
by the pure instinct of every human mind, and both, considered as types,
expressing the law of gradual change and progress in the human soul
itself. What the difference is in mere beauty between a gradated and
ungradated color, may be seen easily by laying an even tint of
rose-color on paper, and putting a rose leaf beside it. The victorious
beauty of the rose as compared with other flowers, depends wholly on the
delicacy and quantity of its color gradations, all other flowers being
either less rich in gradation, not having so many folds of leaf; or less
tender, being patched and veined instead of flushed.
169. (4.) But observe, it is not enough in general that color should be
gradated by being made merely paler or darker at one place than another.
Generally color changes as it diminishes, and is not merely darker at
one spot, but also purer at one spot than anywhere else. It does not in
the least follow that the darkest spots should be the purest; still less
so that the lightest should be the purest. Very often the two gradations
more or less cross each other, one passing in one direction from
paleness to darkness, another in another direction from purity to
dullness, but there will almost always be both of them, however
reconciled; and you must never be satisfied with a piece of color until
you have got both: that is to say, every piece of blue that you lay on
must be _quite_ blue only at some given spot, nor that a large spot; and
must be gradated from that into less pure blue,--grayish blue, or
greenish blue, or purplish blue,--over all the rest of the space it
occupies. And this you must do in one of three ways: either, while the
color is wet, mix with it the color which is to subdue it, adding
gradually a little more and a little more; or else, when the color is
quite dry, strike a gradated touch of another color over it, leaving
only a point of the first tint visible; or else, lay the subduing tints
on in small touches, as in the exercise of tinting the chess-board. Of
each of these methods I have something to tell you separately; but that
is distinct from the subject of gradation, which I must not quit without
once more pressing upon you the preëminent necessity of introducing it
everywhere. I have profound dislike of anything like habit of hand, and
yet, in this one instance, I feel almost tempted to encourage you to get
into a habit of never touching paper with color, without securing a
gradation. You will not, in Turner's largest oil pictures, perhaps six
or seven feet long by four or five high, find one spot of color as large
as a grain of wheat ungradated: and you will find in practice, that
brilliancy of hue, and vigor of light, and even the aspect of
transparency in shade, are essentially dependent on this character
alone; hardness, coldness, and opacity resulting far more from
_equality_ of color than from nature of color. Give me some mud off a
city crossing, some ocher out of a gravel pit, a little whitening, and
some coal-dust, and I will paint you a luminous picture, if you give me
time to gradate my mud, and subdue my dust: but though you had the red
of the ruby, the blue of the gentian, snow for the light, and amber for
the gold, you cannot paint a luminous picture, if you keep the masses of
those colors unbroken in purity, and unvarying in depth.
170. (5.) Next, note the three processes by which gradation and other
characters are to be obtained:
A. Mixing while the color is wet.
You may be confused by my first telling you to lay on the hues in
separate patches, and then telling you to mix hues together as you lay
them on: but the separate masses are to be laid, when colors distinctly
oppose each other at a given limit; the hues to be mixed, when they
palpitate one through the other, or fade one into the other. It is
better to err a little on the distinct side. Thus I told you to paint
the dark and light sides of the birch trunk separately, though, in
reality, the two tints change, as the trunk turns away from the light,
gradually one into the other; and, after being laid separately on, will
need some farther touching to harmonize them: but they do so in a very
narrow space, marked distinctly all the way up the trunk, and it is
easier and safer, therefore, to keep them separate at first. Whereas it
often happens that the whole beauty of two colors will depend on the one
being continued well through the other, and playing in the midst of it:
blue and green often do so in water; blue and gray, or purple and
scarlet, in sky: in hundreds of such instances the most beautiful and
truthful results may be obtained by laying one color into the other
while wet; judging wisely how far it will spread, or blending it with
the brush in somewhat thicker consistence of wet body-color; only
observe, never mix in this way two _mixtures_; let the color you lay
into the other be always a simple, not a compound tint.