I will now suppose that all our figures are draped, and the heads and hands finished. There still remains the selection of the different symbols or attributes which are to give nationality to our personages, and here we must endeavor to reconcile truth with pictorial fitness. We have the whole vegetable and animal kingdom to choose from, and it will go hard if we cannot fit each female figure with some flower, fruit, bird, or beast, which shall be typical of the country she represents and at the same time ornamental and graceful.
The cartoon is now at last finished, and the next thing to be done is to make a colored sketch. I need not go through this process at length. Every one knows that the scheme of color intended at first is often abandoned, and minor changes are innumerable. At last, however, we get what we think a good result, and all our preliminary work is over. Not quite, however, for we have to trace the cartoon on transparent paper, and prick the tracing.
Some artists omit the tedious process of pricking the tracing, but the labor that is thus saved is fully counterbalanced by the trouble of following all the lines of the tracing with a point before an impression can be got, whereas with a pricked tracing a bag of pounded charcoal does the work at once.
I will now give a short account of the different mediums principally in use for mural painting.
The first medium I shall notice is oil, or some modification of oil. The great objection to oil for mural work is the impossibility of seeing the painting when it faces the light. An absorbent ground will to a certain extent mitigate this evil. The use of spirits of turpentine, benzine, and other essences, will also contribute toward giving a flat surface; but do what we will, we can never get in an oil-painting the pure, clear qualities of water-color or fresco.
The compound known as Parris’ medium and sold by Roberson, is not a bad thing for diminishing the shine of oil-painting. It is made of white wax dissolved in spirits of lavender, but I am inclined to think that an absorbent ground prepared with parchment size and whiting is the best preventive of the greasy surface inseparable from oil-painting. The great desideratum in all mural and decorative oil-painting is that every part should have an equal amount of shine.
Take an ordinary oil-picture and place it opposite the light. The lighter parts will be tolerably well seen, but the oily or gummy darks will reflect the light of the sky and spoil the effect completely.
All we can aspire to, in decorative oil-painting, is to give to the dark parts as little shine as there is in the light ones, where white lead and opaque colors generally have been freely used.
I cannot say as much in favor of wax as a medium for grinding the colors in. It is neither fish, flesh, nor good red herring; that is, it has neither the richness of oil nor the luminosity of fresco. Most of the modern decorative pictures in the Paris churches are painted with this medium. The colors are much the same as for oil-painting, but the blacks, browns, and lakes have a very dull appearance. The fluid medium used for painting is a kind of essential oil of lavender, so that this method, if somewhat deficient in light, is at any rate overflowing with sweetness.
I have found that to use the ordinary oil-colors diluted with a medium composed of wax, mastic varnish and turpentine, is by far preferable to legitimate wax-painting. The colors are much more manageable and dry brighter, without having any more shine than when actually ground with wax.