Having given you a list of the necessary materials, I will try to tell you how you should use them. I shall not try to compel you to make short lines or long lines, black blots or white lines: work in your own fashion, only that must be good, and capable of being engraved and printed. I shall not tell you how to draw, but how to draw so that your work may reproduce and print best. You may commence your drawing in either one of two ways, by making a pencil sketch on your sheet of paper which is to be sent to the engraver, preferably in blue pencil which does not photograph, and in as few lines as possible; or by commencing straight away at your final work, in ink; if it is a drawing from nature, I do not see why you should not do this, for it will teach you care in selecting your lines and putting them down. And as you have an ink eraser in metal and rubber you should be able to remove those which are wrong.
But if your design is more in the nature of a composition with elaborate figures, or figures in action, it will be almost impossible to do this. True, most interesting sketches may be made, and should be made and must be made direct from nature. But your final design will in nearly every case have to be built up from these. Therefore, unless you can “see the whole thing in your head” before you put it on paper, so clearly that you only want a model to keep you right, I think you had better make sketch after sketch, and then transfer the best to the sheet on which it is to be completed by putting transfer paper under the sketch and tracing paper over it. Probably you will pencil on the final drawing, but do as little as you can, for the camera, when the drawing comes to be photographed, pays just as much attention to smudges, finger marks, pencil lines, and meaningless accidents as it does to those portions which are brim full of meaning. By neglecting these matters all artists give engravers much trouble, and unless the engraver is an artist too he not infrequently bestows great pains on the reproduction of an accidental line, even though in order to do so he ruins the entire drawing. And again, in all cheap work your drawing is placed with a number of others and no special attention is paid to it, and it reproduces somehow, or don’t, which is much the same thing. But in case of failure you will be blamed by the public.
The first thing to remember in putting your drawing on the paper is the space it is to fill; if it is to be a full page, it must be made the size of that page or twice as large; at any rate it must have some definite relation to it. In the case of half a page, it is only necessary that the top or bottom of the drawing should fit across the printed matter; still, the drawing should not be made so high that it will not fit in, or so narrow as to be ineffective, but if you will look at any book or magazine you will see what I mean.
Again, for cheap rapid work as little cross-hatching as possible should be indulged in, for all cross-hatched lozenges become smaller lozenges in reduction, and the smaller they are the easier it is for them to fill up and clog with ink. Draw your shadows with parallel lines whenever you can without being mechanical; they engrave and print well.
After several years’ experience I am quite unable to say how much or how little a drawing should be reduced, for there is no reason why it should be drawn the same size it is to be engraved, save that the nearer it is the same size, the nearer the result should be to the original; if the reduction is to be great, it is easier to make the design larger and have it mechanically reduced. The excessive reduction of a drawing tends to make the lines run together into a black mass sometimes, and the enlargement of a drawing—this, too, may be done—makes the lines at times look crude and clumsy. But it is impossible to foretell results in any two cases. Only there is one matter: a good drawing in line will, with good engraving and printing, look well, whether the artist knew anything of process or not. But there are some things to be observed, if certain results are wished for.
In simple cheap work the ink should be uniformly black, for the engraved block will be put with type, and inked with the same amount and strength of colour all over; therefore, in order to get variety, distance, effect, you must use lines of different widths, placed at varying distances apart, not of different degrees of colour. In theory at least, then, the foreground should be drawn with a firm bold line, the middle distance with a medium-sized line, the lines themselves closer together, and the extreme distance with a thin line. But there is no rule, only get variety in your line and this will produce variety and interest in the engraved result.
If you make your drawings much larger than they are to be reproduced, you will often be greatly surprised at the change in their appearance. Greys will, by filling up, become darker, and lights lighter owing to the concentration around them of masses of colour; that is, blacks become blacker, and whites whiter in reproduction. But do remember that though the drawings by Boyd Houghton, Millais, F. Walker and Pinwell were made the size you see them, on the wood, in the books of twenty-five years ago, the drawings made to-day by Abbey, for example, are four or five times as large as the published engravings, and are not, in the originals, filled with that microscopic work which appears in the reproductions. But do not make crude lines under the impression that they will ever be anything but crude. Try to make a beautiful drawing, a beautiful line—unless you can do this you will never get a beautiful reproduction; and once you have learned to draw, study the best books and the best magazines, always remembering that drawings to-day are made much larger, as a rule, than you see them on the printed page.
Again, in reproduction you will often find that some parts of the same drawing change more than others; some places, for example, become too weak, others too strong. I cannot explain this, but you will find that it does happen. At times it may be because the photograph is bad, or the etching is rotten, but even with good photography and etching the final result is often disappointing.
In pen work you may run the gamut from solid blacks to the most delicate grey line. Do not try to always, but select a colour scheme which is restrained and appropriate to every drawing.
Solid black will reproduce best because it is a solid mass, excepting in cheap rapid printing, when solid blacks either get too much or too little ink. A number of black lines close together will reproduce almost equally well, because in engraving and printing these lines support the paper and do not take up too much ink. A single thin line, on the contrary, always thickens in the engraving, and often prints badly because in the printing press the ink and paper bear down too heavily upon it and it receives too much ink and thickens up.