When you have got a knowledge of the form, and the character of color and surface, take the animal out-doors, get some one to help hold him, and apply the same principles that would govern your study of a rock or a tree in the open air.
As for fur, and all that sort of thing, treat it as you would any other texture-problem in still life.
CHAPTER XXXIV
PROCEDURE IN A PICTURE
Some pictures, particularly those begun and finished in the open air, may be frankly commenced immediately on the canvas from nature as she is before the painter, and without any special processes or methods of procedure carried on to completion. But many pictures are of a sort which renders this manner of work unwise or impossible. There may be too many figures involved. The composition, the drawing, or other arrangement may be too complicated for it, and then the painter has to have some methodical and systematic way of bringing his picture into existence. He must take preliminary measures to ensure his work coming out as he intends, and must proceed in an orderly and regular manner in accordance with the planning of the work. It is in this sort of thing that he finds sketches and studies essential to the painting of the picture as distinguished from their more common use as training for him, or accumulation of general facts.
Preliminaries.—There must be made numbers of sketches, first of the slightest and merely suggestive, and then of a more complete, kind, to develop the general idea of composition from the first and perhaps crude conception of the picture. All the great painters have left examples of work in these various stages. It is a part of the training of every student in art schools to make these composition sketches, and to develop them more or less fully in larger work. In the French schools there are monthly concours, when men compete for prizes with work, and their success is influenced by a previous concour of these composition sketches.
This preliminary sketch in its completed stage gives the number and position and movement of the figures and accessories, with the arrangement of light and shade and color. There is no attempt to give anything more than the most general kind of drawing, such details as the features, fingers, etc., being neglected. The light and shade on the single figures also is not expressed, but the light and shade effect of the whole picture is carefully shown, and the same with the color-scheme. It is this first sketch that establishes the character of the future picture in everything but the details. Sometimes this work is done on a quite large canvas, but usually is not more than a foot or two long, and of corresponding width.