OF TINTS.
Making good Tints has ever been a matter of extreme difficulty, great perseverance, and too often entire loss of time; and, in the event of success occasionally attending the student's exertions, it is a thousand to one he never gets them twice alike; for that which is done by accident cannot be repeated. The very difficulty attending them, from want of knowledge of those colours that blend well and harmonize in their natures, and the many requisite to charge the memory with, renders them so easily forgotten, that few but professors ever achieve the object sought.
To obviate this,—to save the student's time, that he may devote the more to the attainment of his pursuit,—that he may be enabled to tint a drawing in half an hour, when he would have spent three in making a good tint or two (presuming his capability to do it at all),—induced the Author of this work, at a considerable outlay of time and expense, to form a Box of Tints, in permanent cakes, ready at once for use, and all the necessary purposes of landscape or other painting, and for sketching from nature without inconvenience or difficulty.
As water-colour painting has experienced so much revolution of late, arising from its extensive capabilities,—the best drawings, or rather water-colour paintings, being produced by the balance of opaque and transparent colours,—those tints and mixtures that are found most useful in oil-painting, and most wanting in water, has engaged his particular attention.
He has confided the making them solely to Mr. Charles Smith, of Marylebone-street, Piccadilly. The tints are expressed on the cakes in numbers, which have reference to the coloured plates. In addition to which the following colours are those mostly used:—
Indigo; to which may be added cobalt and French blue. Indian red. Venetian red. Purple lake. Madder lake. Vermilion. Burnt sienna. Raw sienna. Yellow ochre. Gamboge, Brown pink. Raw umber. Vandyke brown. Ivory black.