STUDY OF PINE TREES BY HUBERT HERKOMER. The form above the lowest branch, which looks something like a cloud, shows us the artist’s method of “placing” a branch before finishing it; also the lower parts of the trunks show their placing. All objects should be thus outlined before they are shaded.
{52} wider than the right, (3) that they tipped at an angle of fifteen degrees to our left.
Again, the mass that at first glance looks like a cloud, is really the “placing” of a branch. Now, before the artist put any of the black in his picture, which suggests the dark colors of a pine, he placed all the principal branches, limbs, and the trunks of the two trees, just as you see them in the unfinished places we have pointed out. The reader should need very little more help than this to fit him to go out to nature and begin a landscape.
Almost any element you may see can be begun in this manner. (I use the word element to cover either one object or a group of objects; we say of some picture that it has four elements: a foreground, a pine tree, a clump of trees and distant hills.) For example, without the line representing the limb below Herkomer’s outline for the unfinished branch might almost stand for a cloud—its outline would then simply be a little less toothed. Its upper part might also stand for a group of distant trees. Now, this branch, no less than the trunks, has its big proportions; it is almost twice as long as it is high, and no amount of pretty drawing of details would ever represent that branch if you should start out with a form twice as high as it is wide. Always look out for these dimensions at first. The branch also has a direction—the direction of its axis—which is downward to our left, and no amount of pretty drawing of its details would ever represent this branch if it were represented with a horizontal axis. (The axis of the lowest branch is at a still greater angle; this downward tip is characteristic of the lower branches of the pine, larch, elm, beech, willow, etc.) Now, a cloud has its {53}
STUDY FOR A FIGURE IN A PAINTING. By Michael Munkacsy. This shows the placing of the parts of the figure so that it shows action, though there is no finish.
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STUDIES FROM A MODEL FOR FIGURES IN A PAINTING. By Léon Bonnat. These studies show the placing of the parts of the figures so that they express action, though there is no finish.
{55} axis, a group of trees, and you must not draw a stratus cloud which lies horizontal as though it were a cirrus or a cumulus cloud blown upward by a contrary wind. In the placing of an element, then, it is not the margin of the outline we think of, but the positions of objects, their general bulk, and the direction of their axes.