INTRODUCTORY — DESIGNING OF VALUE TO THE PRINTER — NATURAL ABILITY VERSUS INSTRUCTION — SMALL DESIGNS AS DIFFICULT AS LARGE — READER NOT TO BE DISCOURAGED BECAUSE HE CANNOT BE A FULL-FLEDGED ARTIST — “HOW SHOULD I BEGIN TO LEARN TO DRAW?” — LEARNING TO SEE — INSTRUCTION DOES NOT CONSIST OF NAMING MATERIALS — THE STUDY OF A HAT SEEN IN DIFFERENT POSITIONS — THE VALUE OF OBSERVATION.
THERE has been in recent years a marked change in the character of the printing done in this country; plain printing has been superseded by decorative printing; the typographer of a few years back was only a compositor and pressman, today he should be a designer as well. In view of that requirement this little treatise is written, in the hope that, though its advice may not make an illustrator out of its reader, it will at least acquaint him with some principles of design that he may apply in his daily practice.
The reader will not be deceived, the writer not misunderstood, if at the outset it is put on record that great success in art is dependent much more upon natural ability, aye, genius, than upon study, and that these chapters can only tell you how to study—they cannot guarantee you success. A man of fifty, a master printer, may study our advice thoroughly and then attempt to {18} draw an elephant chasing an African, and the result may be conspicuously inferior to the treatment of the same subject by little eight-year-old Johnny Green who is yet in the primary school; but Johnny Green may have “an eye for drawing” and our master printer be as devoid of it as is a cow of melody in her voice.
Not only is it true that without talent you must not expect to succeed in producing important pictures, such as full-page illustrations, double-column portraits, poster designs and large work in general, but it is almost more unlikely that you will succeed in designing the most simple tailpiece or initial letter. It is quite natural that you should suppose it a very easy task to design an initial letter or a tiny silhouette of a leaf or flower, a branch or wreath or two forming a “printer’s mark”; every artist in Christendom thinks the same—until he tries it; but you would be surprised if I filled this chapter with the history of certain initial letters and devices, and tracing them to their fountain head, we found that in nine cases out of ten they were designed by the very greatest artists of the time.
You can take it as an undisputed fact that should some publishing house wish an ordinary full-page illustration for a book, and at the same time a simple “publisher’s mark,” a device about an inch square for the title-page of that book, they would find ten artists who could execute the former to one who could design the latter so that it would be up to the standard of the best “marks” in history.
Is it then, you ask, our intention at the very start to discourage you, and advise you to attempt nothing because you cannot excel in anything? Not at all. A {19} country editor need not refrain from studying rhetoric so as to improve the style of his editorials, just because he knows that without genius he may not expect to equal the diction of Macaulay. The rhetoric may not give him wit to put in his editorials, but it at least may teach him to cast his sentences properly. So this treatise may not supply you with “art feeling,” but it will, we hope, show you how to make a design in a more workmanlike way than you would without our advice; and we most sincerely advise you to try.
Everyone in asking the question, “How should I begin to learn to draw?” expects that the answer will direct him to use certain materials in a certain way, and that by the manipulation of these materials in this certain way, he will get the desired result. So far as this treatise is concerned, the reader will be disappointed in this regard; it is true that the writer is particularly interested in the technic of the different graphic arts, and later on will have something to say about the best methods for pen drawing, for chalk-plate, for wood engraving; but in these first chapters on drawing it must be distinctly understood that our advice is that the student should not worry about what pencil or what paper he should use, or about how his lines should look, but should realize from the outset that his principal study should be the education of his eye. The reason that we do not draw well in infancy is because we have not learned to see. You may take it as a positive fact that the untrained eye of every man sees things in an absolutely incorrect manner—or rather he does not know how he sees things. Let us take, for example, an immense factory-building with over a hundred windows {20}
THE COURTYARD OF THE SORBONNE IN 1886. Pen drawing by E. Lansyer. Looking at these buildings as in this picture, an artist knows that a doorway or a window in the building with the dome would appear as a perfect rectangle, as we see in the case of the main doorway, because seen “in front view”; but the windows in the buildings at the sides are not perfect rectangles because, being seen “in perspective,” or at an angle, their sills and lintels seem to tip downward. The uneducated eye, however, knowing them to be rectangles, sees them as such, not realizing that each receding window is narrower than its predecessor; and that, moreover, the lintels and sills of a window in a higher story have a greater tip than those of one below, and that every lintel has greater tip than its corresponding sill. This knowledge, however, should be known to all artists through the study of perspective.
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