Fig. 1.
Fig. 2.
Fig. 3.
In learning the art of scrolling, as in learning the art of striping, it is distinctly fortunate to remember that there is no royal road—no mystic method by which one can master the art under the soothing influence of a mid-summer night's dream. The acquirement of the art, as the past masters of the school of ornamental painting understood and practiced it, is the result of patient, arduous practice. For this purpose, a good-sized blackboard is in every way the most desirable surface upon which to work. The beginner should under no circumstances confine his efforts to learn scrolling to a pad of paper and a lead pencil. As an eminent instructor of the art once declared: "Work with a lead pencil on a 2×4 paper, and the chances are that your scrolls will be of the 2×4 order." Working upon the blackboard with a chalk crayon gives the learner a freedom of reach and a valiant command of the pencil attained in no other way. The easy, free-hand work, although it may be lacking in certain highly desirable features of gracefulness, compels the favorable attention of the critic to an extent of which the copy plate design, mathematically precise in general execution, may fall lamentably short. There is a sort of an indefinable naturalness about the original, free-hand scroll quite foreign to the ornament drawn to rule and square measurements. It possesses a quality that elicits admiration, just as madam's tea gown,
"That floats away where it properly may,
And clings where it ought to cling,"
is looked upon as a dainty creation, wondrous fair to see.
