The Practice and Science of Drawing

by Harold Speed

In the first column (No. 1), a touch firmly painted with an equal pressure all along its course is given. This gives you a plane of tone with firm edges the width of your brush, getting gradually darker or lighter as your brush empties, according to the length of the stroke and to whether you are painting into a lighter or darker ground.

In column No. 2 a drag touch is illustrated. This is a very useful one. The brush is placed firmly on the canvas and then dragged from the point lightly away, leaving a gradated tone. A great deal of the modelling in round objects is to be expressed by this variety of handling. The danger is that its use is apt to lead to a too dexterous manner of painting; a dexterity more concerned with the clever manner in which a thing is painted than with the truth expressed.

Column No. 3. This is a stroke lightly and quickly painted, where the brush just grazes the surface of the canvas. The paint is put on in a manner that is very brilliant, and at the same time of a soft quality. If the brush is only moderately full, such touches will not have any hard edges, but be of a light, feathery nature. It is a most useful manner of putting on paint when freshness of colour is wanted, as it prevents one tone being churned up with another and losing its purity. And in the painting of hair, where the tones need to be kept very separate, and at the same time not hard, it is very useful. But in monochrome painting from the cast it is of very little service.

Another method of using a brush is hatching, the drawing of rows of parallel lines in either equal or varying thicknesses. This method will lighten or darken a tone in varying degree, according to whether the lines are thick, thin, or gradated—somewhat in the same way that lines of shading are drawn in line work. In cases where the correction of intricate modelling is desired and where it would be very difficult to alter a part accurately by a deft stroke of the brush, this method is useful to employ. A dry brush can be drawn across the lines to unite them with the rest of the work afterwards. This method of painting has lately been much used by those artists who have attempted painting in separate, pure colours, after the so-called manner of Claude Monet, although so mechanical a method is seldom used by that master.

As your power of drawing increases (from the line drawing you have been doing), casts of hands and heads should be attempted in the same manner as has been described. Illustrations are given of exercises of this description on pages 110 and 122. Unfortunately the photographs, which were taken from the same study at different stages during the painting, are not all alike, the first painting of the lights being too darkly printed in some cases. But they show how much can be expressed with the one tone, when variety is got by using the middle tone to paint into. The two tones used are noted in the right-hand lower corner.

Try to train yourself to do these studies at one sitting. But if you find you cannot manage this, use slower drying colours, say bone brown and zinc white, which will keep wet until the next day.

When you begin studying from the life, proceed in the same way with monochrome studies painted into a middle tone.

And what are you to do if you find, when you have finished, that it is all wrong? I should advise you to let it dry, and then scumble a middle tone right over the whole thing, as you did at first, which will show the old work through, and you can then correct your drawing and proceed to paint the lights and shadows as before. And if only a part of it is wrong, when it is quite dry rub a little, poppy oil thinned with turpentine over the work, as little as will serve to cover the surface. If it is found difficult to get it to cover, breathe on the canvas, the slightest moisture will help it to bite. When this is done, wipe it off with the palm of your hand or an old piece of clean linen. Now paint a middle tone right over the part you wish to retouch, being careful about joining it up to the surrounding work, and proceed as before, drawing in the light and shadow masses.

This form of drawing you will probably find more difficult at first. For the reason already explained it seems natural to observe objects as made up of outlines, not masses. The frame with cottons across it should be used to flatten the appearance, as in making outline drawings. And besides this a black glass should be used. This can easily be made by getting a small piece of glass—a photographic negative will do—and sticking some black paper on the back; turning it over the front to keep the raw edges of the glass from cutting the fingers. Or the glass can be painted on the back with black paint. Standing with your back to the object and your painting, hold this glass close in front of one of your eyes (the other being closed), so that you can see both your painting and the object. Seeing the tones thus reduced and simplified, you will be enabled more easily to correct your work.

I should like to emphasise the importance of the setting-out work necessary for brush-drawing. While it is not necessary to put expressive work into this preparatory work, the utmost care should be taken to ensure its accuracy as far as it goes. It is a great nuisance if, after you have put up some of your fair structure, you find the foundations are in the wrong place and the whole thing has to be torn down and shifted. It is of the utmost necessity to have the proportions and the main masses settled at this early stage, and every device of blocking out with square lines and measuring with your knitting-needle, &c., should be adopted to ensure the accuracy of these large proportions. The variations and emphases that feeling may dictate can be done in the painting stage. This initial stage is not really a drawing at all, but a species of mapping out, and as such it should be regarded. The only excuse for making the elaborate preparatory drawings on canvas students sometimes do, is that it enables them to learn the subject, so that when they come to paint it, they already know something about it. But the danger of making these preparatory drawings interesting is that the student fears to cover them up and lose an outline so carefully and lovingly wrought; and this always results in a poor painting. When you take up a brush to express yourself, it must be with no fear of hurting a careful drawing. Your drawing is going to be done with the brush, and only the general setting out of the masses will be of any use to you in the work of this initial stage. Never paint with the poor spirit of the student who fears to lose his drawing, or you will never do any fine things in painting. Drawing (expressing form) is the thing you should be doing all the time. And in art, "he that would save his work must often lose it," if you will excuse the paraphrase of a profound saying which, like most profound sayings, is applicable to many things in life besides what it originally referred to. It is often necessary when a painting is nearly right to destroy the whole thing in order to accomplish the apparently little that still divides it from what you conceive it should be. It is like a man rushing a hill that is just beyond the power of his motor-car to climb, he must take a long run at it. And if the first attempt lands him nearly up at the top but not quite, he has to go back and take the long run all over again, to give him the impetus that shall carry him right through.