Landscape Photo. No. 2.
Still Life, etc.—If your subject be still life, flowers, or an animal or other figure, go about it in the same way. Look at it well. Try to get an idea of its general shape, and block that out with a few lines. You will almost always find a horizontal line which by cutting across the mass will help you to decide where the mass will best come. First, the mass must be about the right size, and then it must balance well on the canvas. Any of the things suggested as helping about drawing and values will of course help you here. The reducing-glass will help you to get the size and position of things. The card with a square hole in it will do the same. Even a sort of little frame made with the fingers and thumbs of your two hands will cut off the surrounding objects, and help you see your group as a whole with other things out of the way.
Walk About.—A change of position of a very few feet sometimes makes a great difference in the looks of a subject. The first view of it is not always the best. Walk around a little; look at it from one point and from another. Take your time. Better begin a little later than stop because you don't like it and feel discouraged. Time taken to consider well beforehand is never lost. "Well begun is half done."
Relief.—In beginning a thing you want to have the first few minutes' work to do the most possible towards giving you something to judge by. You want from the very first to get something recognizable. Then every subsequent touch, having reference to that, will be so much the more sure and effective. Look, then, first for what will count most.
What to look for.—Whether you lay your work out first with black-and-white or with paint, look to see where the greatest contrast is. Where is there a strong light against dark and a strong dark against light? Not the little accents, but that which marks the contact of two great planes. Find this first, and represent it as soon as you have got the main values, in this way the whole thing will tell as an actuality. It will not yet carry much expression, but it will look like a fact, and it will have established certain relations from which you can work forward.
Colors.—It ought to go without saying that the colors as they come from the tube are not right for any color you see in nature however you think they look. But beginners are very apt to think that if they cannot get the color they want, they can get it in another kind of tube. This is a mistake. The tubes of color that are actually necessary for almost every possible tint or combination in nature are very few. But they must be used to advantage. Now and then one finds his palette lacking, and must add to it; but after one has experimented a while he settles down to some eight or ten colors which will do almost everything, and two or three more that will do what remains. When you work out-of-doors you may find that more variety will help you and gain time for you; that several blues and some secondaries it is well to have in tubes besides the regular outfit. Still even then, when you have got beyond the first frantic gropings, you will be surprised to see yourself constantly using certain colors and neglecting others. These others, then, you do not need, and you may leave them out of your box.
Too Many Tubes.—If you have too many colors, they are a trouble rather than a help to you. You must carry them all in your mind, and you do not so soon get to thinking of the color in nature and taking up the paint from different parts of your palette instinctively—which means that you are gaining command of it. Never put a new color on your palette unless you feel the actual need of it, or have a special reason for it. Better get well acquainted with the regular colors you have, and have only as many as you can handle well.
Mixing.—Use some system in mixing your paint. Have your palette set the same way always, so that your brush can find the color without having to hunt for it. Have a reasonable way too of taking up your color before you mix it. Don't always begin with the same one. Is the tint light or dark? strong or delicate? What is the prevailing color in it? Let these things affect the sequence of bringing the colors together for mixing. Let these things have to do also with the proportionate quantity of each. Suppose you have a heavy dark green to mix, what will you take first? Make a dash at the white, put it in the middle of the palette, and then tone it down to the green? How much paint would you have to take before you got your color? Yet I've seen this very thing done, and others equally senseless. What is the green? Dark. Bluish or warm? Will reddish or yellowish blue do it best? How much space do you want that brushful to cover? Take enough blue, add to it a yellow of the sort that will make approximately the color. Don't stir them up; drag one into the other a little—very little. The color is crude? Another color or two will bring it into tone. Don't mix it much. Don't smear it all over your palette. Make a smallish dab of it, keeping it well piled up. If you get any one color too great in quantity, then you will have to take more of the others again to keep it in balance. Be careful to take as nearly the right proportions of each at the first picking up, so as to mix but few times; for every time you add and mix you flatten out the tone more, and lose its vibration and life.
Now, if the color is too dark, what will you lighten it with? White? Wait a minute. Think. Will white take away the richness of it? White always grays and flattens the color. Don't put it into a warm, rich color unless it belongs there. Then only as much as is needed.