The Elements of Drawing by John Ruskin (smart books to read .txt) 📕

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):

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.

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