Modelling. — In the same way that you have laid out the proportions in mass, lay out your proportions of light and shade. Model your drawing by avoiding the small until the large variations of shade are in place. Avoid seeing curves in relief [130] as you have avoided curves of outline. Try to analyze the modelling into flat planes, each one large enough to give a definite mass of relief. Don't be afraid of an edge in doing this. Let your flat tone come frankly up to the next tone and stop. This again is not for any effect in itself, but only for facility and exactness. Later you can loose it as much as you see fit in breaking up the drawing into the more delicate planes, and these again into the most subtle.

Study first the outline and then the planes. Constantly compare them as to relation; you will find it suggestive. Remember that your aim is to produce a whole, not a lot of parts, and although a whole includes the parts, the parts are incidental.

Measurements. — You will always have to use measurements for the sake of accuracy. Probably you will never be able to dispense with them. The best way would be to take them as a matter of course, and get so that you make them almost mechanically, without thinking of it. You will save yourself an immense deal of time and trouble by accepting this at once; for accuracy is impossible without measurements, and the habit of accuracy is the greatest time-saver.

Hold your charcoal in your hand freely, so that your thumb can slip along it and mark off parts of the object when you sight at them across the [131] coal. Measure horizontal and vertical proportions into themselves and into each other. Height and breadth are checks to each other. If the height is a certain proportion of the breadth, then the smaller proportions of height must have equivalent proportions to each other as well as to breadth. Measure these and you are sure of being right.

Steps. — Divide your drawing into steps or stages of work. You will find it a helpful thing in studying. You will do it quite naturally later. Do it deliberately at first, as a matter of training.

First step. — Measure the extreme height and breadth of the whole group or object of your drawing, with accuracy, and mark each extreme.

Second step. — Outline the great mass of it with the simplest lines possible. Give the general shape of the whole. This blocks it in.

Third step. — Measure each of the objects in the group, or the parts most prominent, if it be a single object. Measure its height and breadth, both in its own proportion and in proportion to the dimensions of the other parts and of the whole. Enclose it in straight lines as you did with the whole mass.

Fourth step. — Find the more important of the lesser proportions in each object, and block them out also. This should map out. your drawing exactly and with some completeness.

Fifth step. — Lay in simple flat tones to fill in [132] these outlines, and keep the relations of light and dark very carefully as you do so.

Sixth step. — This should leave your paper with a few large masses of dark and light, which can now be cut into again with the next smaller masses, giving more refinement to the whole. This also should so break up the edges as to get rid of any feeling of squareness or edginess.

Seventh step. — Put in such accents of dark, or take out such of light, as will give necessary character and force to the drawing.

I do not say that this method produces the most finished drawing; but it is a most excellent way to study drawing, and, more or less modified, is practically the basis of all methods. In practised hands it allows of any amount of exactness or freedom of execution. I have seen most beautiful work done in this way.

Home Study. — It is not necessary to have a teacher in order to draw well; but it is necessary to find out what are the essentials of good drawing, and to work definitely and acquire them.

Good drawing is a combination of exactness and. freedom; and the exactness must come first. The structure of the thing must be shown without unnecessary detail. You should always look at any really good drawing you can come at, and try to see what there may be in it of helpful suggestion to you. [134]

Drawing of Hands. Dürer. [135]

Study the Masters. — Get photographs of drawings by the masters of drawing, and study them. See how they searched their model for form and character. Do not make so much of the actual stroke as the manner in which it is made to express and lend itself to the meaning.

In this drawing by Albrecht Dürer you have a splendid example of exactness and feeling for character. You could have no better type of what to look for and how to express it. Although it is not important that you should lay on the lines of shading just as this is done, it is important to notice how naturally they follow, and conform to, the character of the surface — which is one of the ways in which the point helps to search out the modelling.

This drawing is made with a black and a white chalk on a gray ground; a very good way to study.

A good hint is also offered in this drawing, of the modesty of the old masters, in subject. A hand or part of any object is enough to study from. There is no need to always demand a picture in everything you do.

Materials. — For all purposes which come in the range of the painter you should use charcoal. For purposes of study it is the most satisfactory of materials; it is sensitive, easily controlled, and easily corrected. For sketching or preliminary drawing on the canvas it is equally good. [136]

You should have also a plumb-line with which to test vertical positions of parts in relation to each other, and this, with the pencil held horizontally for other relative positions, gives you all you need in that direction.

In drawing on the canvas it is not often necessary to do more than place the various objects and draw their outlines carefully and accurately. Sometimes, however, as in faces, or in pictures which include important figures, you will need a shaded drawing, and this can be done perfectly with charcoal, and fixed with fixative afterwards.

Imitation. — Perfect drawing, in the sense of exact drawing, is not the most important thing. A drawing may be exact, and yet not be the truer for it. It may be inexact, and yet be true to the greater character. So, too, the drawing may have to change an accidental fact which is not worth the trouble of expression or which will injure the whole. There is something more important than detail, and the essential characteristics can be expressed sometimes only by a drawing which is deliberately false in certain things in order to be the more true to the larger fact.

Then, too, there is an individuality which the artist has to express through his representation of the external; and he is justified in altering or slighting facts in order to bring about that more important self-expression. Of course the self must [137] be worth expressing. There is no excuse for mere falsification nor for mere inability. But a good workman will not be guilty of that, and the complete picture in its unity will be his justification for whatever means he has taken.

Feeling. — Drawing must be a matter of feeling. A perception of essential truth of a thing, as much as of trained observation of the facts. The good draughtsman becomes so by training his observation of facts first, always searching for those most important, and emphasizing those; and with the power which will come in time to his eye and hand easily and quickly to grasp and express facts, will come also the power of mind to grasp the essential characteristics. And the trained hand and eye will permit the most perfect freedom of expression. This is the desideratum of the student; this is the end to be aimed at, — the perfect union of the trained eye and hand to see and do, and the trained mind to feel and select, and the freedom of expression which comes of that perfect union. [138]