Example of French Art School studies, from plates published under the direction of Bargue and Gérôme, showing method of shading in simple tones without much reflected light or half-tones.
{100} we must search further; this we did, and luckily, in the back of the magazine, found the advertisement of a series of articles by Pierre Choudieu, and one of the paragraphs in it read, “Pierre Réné Choudieu, naquit a Angers,” etc. This translated meant that he, Choudieu, was born at Angers, so that we fathomed our problem at last, and give the result under the cut.
The foot plates are identical in treatment with the plates of hands given on pages [66] and [67]. The reader should compare these plates, that he may understand that a method may be learned from the drawing of one object and applied to the drawing of a thousand other objects. You must not expect that in a brief treatise of this kind we can give specimens of every object that the printer may have occasion to draw—we should have to publish an encyclopædia for that—but we do purpose to give methods which will enable him to draw every kind of tangible object with light and shade upon it. These hands and feet studies may be used as guides to show how any such object may be “modeled,” i. e., shaded so that the object seems to be solid.
CHAPTER XI.
MORE ABOUT THE NASO-LABIAL LINE — IT SUGGESTS OLD AGE — ABSENT IN YOUTH — DRAWING NOT ARBITRARY — LINES INTRODUCED BECAUSE THEY ARE IN NATURE — LINES MADE BY THE ORBICULAR MUSCLE AND THE CROW’S FEET (THESE SUGGESTIVE OF OLD AGE) — LINE AT THE CORNER OF THE MOUTH — LINES MADE BY THE FRONTAL MUSCLE — SUGGESTIVE OF OLD AGE OR OF PASSION — MUCH USED BY THE ACTOR.
LET us harp a little longer upon the naso-labial line. We reproduce two very beautiful drawings by Grellet, the one of a young girl, the other of an old man. How suggestive is the old man’s head because of the strong marking of the naso-labial line. Do you not realize how easily you could draw this line, and the whole head for that matter, in the manner of the Bonnard Choudieu? But valuable as it is by itself, how much more suggestive in connection with the young girl’s head, where the naso-labial line is hardly perceptible. This is a lesson in negation, at the value of which we have hinted so often. It is your business to learn when to put in a line, but equally your business to learn when to leave it out. Therefore we give with this chapter some heads of younger persons, that you may learn this very lesson. Take the Fred Walker head. How like the Watts drawing, so far as its treatment goes; but the naso-labial line is missing. What is the result? {102}
PORTRAIT OF FRED WALKER. Pen drawing by E. G. T. Note entire absence of naso-labial line, and of line about orbicular muscles. Absence of these lines indicate youth. Contrast with the Watts and Choudieu heads, where strong markings are prominent because of advanced age of the subjects.
{103} Why, we have the characteristics of a younger man. In this little comparison you have the foundation of all art study. Drawing is not arbitrary; we do not introduce lines into a face simply because this artist or that artist did so; we introduce them because their counterpart is found in nature. It is not in the province of these papers, as we have said, to tell the printer how he should draw every object he may attempt to delineate—a waste-paper basket, the head of a cow, a printing press, or a hat. But we can give him hints which will help him to observe for himself the characteristics of any object under the sun which he may wish to draw. If he finds around the mouth of a cow more pronounced lines than in a calf, he must put them in. If in one trash basket the wickerwork runs upward with each line parallel, he must draw it by perpendicular parallel lines, while in another one the wickerwork is interwoven diagonally and he must represent it by diagonal lines. In a coat sleeve, the arm hanging down, there are but few cross-folds, so he introduces few cross-lines into a sketch of such a sleeve, but when the arm is bent many more folds occur at the elbow and he therefore introduces more cross-lines in his drawing of the sleeve. This is about all there is to the science of drawing.
Now let us proceed a little further. In the Watts we notice two or three lines below the lower eyelid; these we find also in the Gaillard, but they are absent in the Donatello Young Girl’s Head by Grellet; they are very perceptible in the Brontolone. Here we have to do with another muscle. In the human head the eye is {104}