MANIPULATION
=Premier Coup.=--Something similar to what I have spoken of as "direct
painting" has long been a much-advocated manner of painting in France,
under the name of _Premier Coup_; which means, translated literally,
"first stroke."
It is taught that the painter should use no after or overworkings at
all; but that he should carefully and deliberately select the color
for his brush-stroke, and then lay it on the canvas at one stroke,
each after-stroke being laid beside some previous one, until the
canvas has been covered by a mosaic of color each shade representing a
single "first-stroke," with no after-stroke laid over it to modify its
effect. Such a process tends to great deliberation of work and
exactness of study. Probably no better thing was ever devised for the
training of the eye and hand. But it has its limits, and is not often
rigidly adhered to in the painting of pictures; although the fresh,
direct effect of this sort of work is preserved as far as possible in
much modern French work, and that quality is held in great esteem.
This manner of painting is especially useful in the making of sketches
and studies, and leads to a strong control of the brush and the
resources of the palette.
In all painting of this character the color should have body.
Transparent color should not be used alone, but only to modify the
tint of the more solid pigments; for the transparent colors used
indiscriminately are apt to crack, which characteristic is avoided
when the heavier color forms the body of the paint.
=Solid Painting.=--In most cases solid painting is the safest,--the
least likely to crack, and the most safely cleaned from varnish and
dirt without injury to the paint itself. It is firmer in character
too, and gives more solidity of effect to the picture.
=Mixing.=--In mixing colors you should be careful not to over mix.
Don't stir your paint. Too much mixing takes the life out of the
color. Particles of the pure color not too much broken up by mixing
are valuable to your work, giving vibration and brilliancy to it. The
reverse is muddiness, which is sure to come from too much fussing and
overworking of wet paint. Don't use more than three pigments in one
tint if you can help it, and mix them loosely. If you must use more
colors, mix still more loosely. Put all the colors together, one
beside the other, drag them together with the brush, scoop them up
loosely on the end of it, and lay the tint on freely and frankly.
Never muddle the color on the canvas. Don't put one color over another
more than you can help; you will only get a thick mass of paint of one
kind mixing with a mass of another, and the result will be dirty
color, which of all things in painting is most useless.
Keep the color clean and fresh, and have your brush-strokes firm and
free. Never tap, tap, tap, your paint; make up your mind what the
color is, and mix it as you want it. Decide just where the touch is to
go, and lay it on frankly and fairly, and leave it. If it isn't right,
daubing into it or pat-patting it won't help it. Either leave it, or
mix a new color, and lay it on after having scraped this one off.
Don't try to economize on your mixing. A color mixed for one place
will never do for another, so don't try to paint another place with
it. Have the patience to proceed slowly, and mix the color specially
for each brush-stroke. On the other hand, don't be niggardly with your
paint. Don't use less paint than you need. Mix an ample brushful and
put it on; then mix another, and use judgment as to how much you
should use each time. The variety of tone and value which comes of
mixing new color for every touch of the brush is in itself a charm in
a painting, aside from the greater truth you are likely to get by it.
[Illustration: =Good Bock.= _Manet._
To illustrate direct and solid painting.]
=Corrections.=--As far as you can, make corrections by over-painting
when the paint is dry, or nearly so. When I say don't work into wet
color to correct, I do not mean that you are never to do so, but that
to do it too much is likely to get your work muddy and pasty. Of
course it is almost impossible to avoid doing so sometimes, but when
you do, do it with deliberation. Don't lose your head and pile wet
paint on wet paint in the vain hope of getting the color by force of
piling it on. You will only get it worse and worse. Get it as nearly
right as you can. If it is hopeless, scrape it off clean, and mix a
fresh tint. If it is as near right as you can see to mix it now, go
ahead; and put a better color on that place to-morrow when it is dry,
if you can.
=Keep at it.=--But above all don't be permanently satisfied with the
almost. Don't be afraid to put paint over dry paint till it is right.
Work at it day after day. Let the paint get thick if it will, if only
you get the thing right. The secret of getting it right is to keep at
it, and be satisfied with nothing less than the best you can do. When
you can see nothing wrong you can do no better. But as long as your
eye will recognize a difference between what is on the canvas and what
ought to be there, you have not done your best, and you are shirking
if you stop. Never call a thing done as long as you can see something
wrong about it. No matter what any one else says, your work must come
up _at least_ to the standard of what you yourself can see.
=Loose Painting.=--Sometimes it is necessary to lay on paint very
loosely in order to get vibration of warm and cool color or of pure
pigment in the same brush-stroke, or to let the under paint show
somewhat through the loose texture of the paint over it. Too much of
this sort of thing is not to be desired, but its effect in the right
place is not to be obtained in any other way. The paint may be dragged
over the canvas with a long brush charged with color more or less
thoroughly mixed, as seems most effectual, or it may be flipped into
its place, or it may be hatched on with parallel strokes. All these
ways will be spoken of as they suggest themselves in other chapters.
Solid color, generally, is used in this manner, and the effect of body
is rather strengthened by it than the reverse.
=Scumbling.=--Another means of modifying the color and effect of a
painting has perhaps always been more or less commonly in use. This is
called _scumbling_, and may be considered under the head of solid
painting, as it is always done with body, and never with transparent,
color. The process consists of rubbing a mixture of body color,
without thinning, over a surface previously painted and dried.
Generally this _scumble_ is of a lighter color than the
under-painting, and is rubbed on with a stubby brush slightly charged
with the paint. As much surface as is desired may be covered in this
way, and the result is to give a hazy effect to that part, and to
reduce any sharpness of color or of drawing. Often the effect is very
successfully obtained. Distant effects may be painted solidly and
rather frankly, and then brought into a general indefiniteness by
scumbling. Too much scumbling will make a picture vague and soft, and
after a scumble it is best to paint into it with firm color to avoid
this.
The scumble may be used with the richer and darker colors, too, to
modify towards richness the tone of parts of the picture, or to darken
the value. Most often, however, its value lies in its use to bring
harsher and sharper parts together, and to give the hazy effect when
it is needed.
Scumbling will not have a good effect when it is not intended to
varnish the picture afterwards; for the oil in the paint is absorbed
immediately, and the rubbing of color gives a dead look to the canvas
which is very unpleasant, and decidedly the reverse of artistic.
=Glazing.=--A very valuable process, the reverse of scumbling, is
glazing. It has always been in use since the invention of the oil
medium. All the Italian painters used it; it is an essential part of
their system of coloring. The rich, deep color of Titian, the warm
flesh of Raphael, and the jewel-like quality of the early German
painters are impossible without some form of glaze. The Germans
perhaps made glazes with white of egg before oil was used as a
vehicle. But to glaze is the only way to get the fullest effect of the
quality characteristic of the transparent paints.
A glaze is a thin wash of transparent color flowed over an
under-painting to modify its tone or to add to its effect. It is not
always transparent color, but usually it is. Sometimes opaque or
semi-opaque color may be used, and it is a glaze by virtue of the fact
that it is thinned with a vehicle either oil or varnish, and _flowed_
on. A scumble is _rubbed_ on, and is never pure transparent color.
=Advantages of Glazing.=--The advantages are the gain in harmony, in
force, in brilliancy; you may correct a color when it is wrong, or
perfect it when it is not possible to get the force or richness
required without it. These are the qualities which have made it used
by all schools more or less.
=Disadvantages.=--There are, however, quite as evident and marked
disadvantages. The free use of oil as a thinning vehicle, although it
makes possible a greater degree of richness of color, is very likely
to turn the picture brown in time. Oil will always eventually have a
browning effect on all paints, even when mixed with them as little as
is absolutely necessary. If you make a tinted varnish of oil (which
is practically what a glaze is), you add so much, to the surely
darkening action of the oil on the picture.
If, again, you depend upon a glaze for the richness of color for your
picture, and you use a color which is not permanent, your glaze fades,
and your color is not there. A glaze is particularly liable to be
injured by the cleaner if it ever gets into his hands. He works down
to fresh color, and what with the browning of the glaze and the fact
that the cleaner is more anxious that the picture should be cleaned
than that its color should be fine, he will, in nine cases out of ten,
_clean_ off the glaze which may be the final and most expensive color
the painter has put on it.
Glazing is little used nowadays, compared with what it once was. But
there are times when you cannot get what you want in any other way,
and when you are sure that glazing is the only thing which will give
you your result, the only law for the painter comes in,--get your
result.
=Precautions.=--If you do glaze, however, there is a right and a wrong
way. You should not use a glaze as a last resort. It is better to
calculate on it beforehand; for you always glaze with a darker tint
upon a lighter one, so that if you have not allowed for this, you will
get your picture too low in tone before you know it.
If you want to make your picture, or a part of it, brighter and
lighter, bring it up in pitch with body color first, with solid
painting, and then glaze it.
Do not glaze on color which is not well dried. The drying of the under
color and the drying of the glaze are apt to be different in point of
time, and the picture will crack. If the vehicle is the same as was
used in the under-painting, and the drying qualities of both paintings
are the same, there is no danger. But when color dries, it shrinks and
flattens, and two kinds of colors shrinking differently are sure to
pull apart, and that causes cracking. If the under-painting is well
dry, but not hard and glossy on the surface, and is capable of still
absorbing enough of the new color's vehicle to bind the coats
together, your glaze will stand. But rather than have it too soft,
have the under-painting too hard, and then before you glaze go over it
with a little thin, quick-drying varnish, and glaze into that. The
varnish will hold the two coats of paint together.
Glazing, as well as scumbling, implies the obligation to varnish your
picture. Whenever you use oil freely you will have to varnish your
picture to keep it bright and fresh in color.
It would be wise never to use a glaze as a final process. Glaze to get
the tone or to modify it, but paint into the glaze with body color,
and you keep the advantage of the glaze without many of the
disadvantages of it, and the picture has a more solid effect of
painting.
=Frottee.=--Closely akin to the glaze in manner, but very different in
use, is the _frottee_, or "rubbing." This is generally used on the
fresh surface of the canvas, to "rub in" the light and shade or the
first coloring of the picture after the drawing is done. It is one of
the safest and wisest ways of beginning your picture. You can either
rub in the picture with a _frottee_ of one color, as sienna or umber,
or you can use all the colors in their proper places, only using very
little vehicle, and making something very thin in tint, somewhat
between a glaze and a scumble. You can make a complete drawing in
monochrome in this way, or you can lay in all the ground colors of the
picture till it has much the effect of a complete painting. Then, as
you paint and carry the picture forward, every color you put on will
be surrounded with approximately the true relations, instead of being
contrasted by a glare of white canvas.
A _frottee_ is a most sympathetic ground to paint over.