What is glazing and scumbling?
Scumbling is going over distance with white or grey, rubbing it hard and dry, so as to obscure the parts that stand too prominently out; it softens harshnesses, sends back portions, and does its part in aiding the general harmony of the distance and middle distance.
Glazing is the use of transparent colours with some sort of medium, such as madders, siennas, browns, to give richness to the depths, lower the tone in places needful, as foregrounds and such like, that come direct with all their local hues about them; it brings things forward, as scumbling sends objects back.
Tone is the cast of your scale of colour, the setting of your key, the tuning of the pitchfork, to be determined on before you begin your picture, and remembered all through it; and it is the forgetting of this at times which stamps the amateur.
Style.—Of course everyone has his own taste to consult in this, and what you admire you will, consciously or not, imitate, until nature rectifies it and gives you a style of your own. The artist must fluctuate among several styles, always following and trying to understand nature, even while he admires other painters, until at last the scales fall from his eyes, and he relies only on the powers given him when he least expected it. A spark of what is to be will show out here and there until the to be has come.
That is, unless when, in their frantic efforts to be original, painters hunt heaven and earth for the most startling effect, subject, or treatment; then they become like French cooks—continually stirring their minds for new mixtures to catch and astonish the public taste, spending all their foolish energies in the spicing of old stale thoughts.
It may be we admire Sam Bough, with his versatile fancy and vigorous touch; or Lockhart, Macdonald, Fildes, &c., with their strong, healthy ‘go’; or Herdman, Faed, &c., with their sweet touch and poetic minds; or Sir Noel Paton, with his exquisite drawing, radiant colouring, and originality of conception; or Waller Paton, with his purple and gold; or the late lamented Paul Chalmers, who flung everything into the scale against colour and made it weigh them down; or Harvey, who chose the moral thought; or Gustave Doré, who revels in the image. I could go on naming hosts who have styles distinct by power or affectation, for it is in the style that we show our affectation, as we do it in our walking and our talking; but I would only say that if you wish to be natural and great, think very little upon the style you would take, and more upon the thought you wish to express; be earnest in your work, and by earnestness you will forget your delivery, and so be both natural and original. And, after all, what does it matter whether people say we are like So-and-so or not, if we are doing our very best? We must find the true peace with honour, and the repose that ever follows honest, earnest exertions.
It is also good practice to draw with the point, pencil, or pen as rapidly as possible all that partakes of motion—ships sailing, engines puffing out the volumes of steam and smoke, clouds, water, waving trees, and reeds. Fill up your books and scraps of paper with all sorts of shorthand notes; very likely you will not be able to decipher the wild scratchings again, but they have done their duty while you were scribbling them in by fixing something in your mind.
Watch closely as you sketch, and after you get home think it all out and write down as nearly as possible all about it—the colours you think should be used for it, the shape of it, the comparative size, and also, if you can, the poetry and emotions it awoke in you.
Books on painting, as a rule, are only confusing to the mind of the novice—filled with words difficult to comprehend, and of very little use when the conundrum is solved. Like recipe and cookery books, they serve, after you know your subject without them, to warn you against what they advise, also to advertise the many colours you are to flounder amongst for a season. But nature is the best recipe-book: her problems are as easy to unravel, and when read, serve your lifetime.