DRAWING BY MR. PHIL. MAY.
From "English Illustrated Magazine". An example of bold open drawing.
In most cases, for all the purposes of illustration, a black coat need not be suggested by any more lines of shading than a white gown; but the artist who so determines may carry his work to a higher standard and, with greater labour, even succeed in giving a suggestion of colour in the objects portrayed. But, even in such elaborate work, there should be no more execution than is essential, and the finished drawing should in no case make its elaborate execution felt. The thing which must first impress the spectator is the success of the general effect; never should there be first awakened a feeling of astonishment at the extraordinary amount of patience bestowed, or labour expended. If the first remark called forth is one of admiration for the extraordinary dexterity, we may be pretty sure that the draughtsman has been betrayed into the commonly besetting sin of over-elaboration, and whatever success has been attained in the effect rendered it would have been probably better if produced with less effort. It would have been more forcible if not overwhelmed, as it were, with so much work.
Never, then, let the delight which we may feel in making a pretty "finished" drawing get the better of our judgment when drawing for reproduction. Remember that "prettiness" comes very near to "pettiness," and delicacy and fineness are apt to become "niggling" and pedantic; coarseness is a lesser danger than excessive neatness.
Much of this, as already suggested, may be more clearly learned from the careful examination and comparison of good published drawings.
Imitate, and copy if you like, up to a certain degree, remembering always that you are thus copying merely to ascertain by what means other men express their ideas in line, and not for your own practice.
In like manner etchings, engravings, and indeed every kind of print made up of lines, may be studied and, to some extent, copied; but only in order to familiarise oneself with what lines, and combinations of lines, may be made to do; but the danger of continuing such a practice cannot be too much emphasised. Every artist or draughtsman, be he beginner or expert, must draw for himself and according to his own feelings and promptings. In every department of art the successful have had their imitators, and these again their imitators, and at each successive stage the further one gets from originality, the more trammelled, the more impotent and hopelessly beyond the possibility of really great work.
That the drawing is not the end in view, but merely a means to an end (that end being the reproduction), is a matter to which I shall refer later on; but it should here be noted, and moreover the student may be reminded, that every line and every mark which he makes will be similarly reproduced by the process. When drawing for wood engraving, the engraver could be instructed to strengthen this or leave out that; not so the mechanical block, which is to be regarded as normally an untouched and purely mechanical thing, only to be altered by hand on the rarest possible occasions, and then only when time and circumstances permit. This character of indiscriminating facsimile is not to be considered as a disadvantage in any way; the good draughtsman is thankful for it, he knows what to reckon upon, and to all it must be an incentive to do one's best. It is the same difference as between a mirror and an average photographer's portrait: the mirror may show us all our faults and yet, if we have any beauty, it does not belie us; while we know how often the ordinary commercial carte-de-visite is unreliable.