Good proportion and the right arrangement of light and dark values will often make an object beautiful, without the addition of ornament. In the chapter on still life, the objects you studied were not decorated, but they were well designed in their beauty of proportions, their color, and their contrast in values.
Many familiar objects such as envelopes, boxes, and book-covers, depend for beauty on these simple elements. The sketch of the portfolio on this page is beautiful because it has a fine proportion of parts, and because the gray values of these parts are harmonious. If the dark band of the back had been wider or narrower, if the space for the name had been placed differently, or if the size of the corner-pieces had been changed, the harmony of parts would have been disturbed, and the portfolio would not have been beautiful. Or, if the dark gray trimming had been black, there would have been too great a difference between the values used, and that again would disturb the harmonious effect of the whole. You can tell how large to make the parts, where to put them, and what arrangement of values to use, only by trying several ways, and then selecting the most beautiful.
This portfolio may be made by pasting tinted paper or book linen over cardboards. The boards should be covered first with the material chosen for the outside. Then the corners and back should be added, and a lining of paper pasted across both boards on the inside. The space for a name on the outside should be carefully planned. Within this space should be drawn very carefully, the letters of any name you may wish to place on the portfolio.
Color Schemes from Nature.
In the world about you, every object that you see has color. From the bright colors you can so easily see in flowers, leaves, grasses, and the sunset sky, to the grayed colors of tree trunks, clouds, the ground, and buildings, there is the greatest variety and range. Even in the moonlight, objects though greatly changed in effect, still have color. If it were not for this, we could not see them. It is only in the darkest night, when we can see but a few feet ahead of us, that objects seem to lose their color.
In our houses, too, everything has color—not the bright hues that we find in flowers and landscapes, but softer, grayed color. We would not like carpets and wall-paper of the bright color we find in poppies, for instance. The colors we use in our furnishings should not be glaring and intense, but quiet and restful. To find these color relations, and to train the eye to know and enjoy fine color harmonies, we study what artists have done, in paintings and other works of art. In nature, too, we find color suggestions in endless variety. In autumn the world is flooded with rich color. Even the common weed that is shown you on this page shows a combination of colors that would be safe to use in any work of our own. See how the colors in the plant have been arranged in a little scale. Such an arrangement is called a color scheme.