The Painter in Oil Part 23

PROCEDURE IN A PICTURE

Some pictures, particularly those begun and finished in the open air, may be frankly commenced immediately on the canvas from nature as she is before the painter, and without any special processes or methods of procedure carried on to completion. But many pictures are of a sort which renders this manner of work unwise or impossible. There may be too many figures involved. The composition, the drawing, or other arrangement may be too complicated for it, and then the painter has to have some methodical and systematic way of bringing his picture into existence. He must take preliminary measures to ensure his work coming out as he intends, and must proceed in an orderly and regular manner in accordance with the planning of the work. It is in this sort of thing that he finds sketches and studies essential to the painting of the picture as distinguished from their more common use as training for him, or acc.u.mulation of general facts.

=Preliminaries.=--There must be made numbers of sketches, first of the slightest and merely suggestive, and then of a more complete, kind, to develop the general idea of composition from the first and perhaps crude conception of the picture. All the great painters have left examples of work in these various stages. It is a part of the training of every student in art schools to make these composition sketches, and to develop them more or less fully in larger work. In the French schools there are monthly _concours_, when men compete for prizes with work, and their success is influenced by a previous _concour_ of these composition sketches.

This preliminary sketch in its completed stage gives the number and position and movement of the figures and accessories, with the arrangement of light and shade and color. There is no attempt to give anything more than the most general kind of drawing, such details as the features, fingers, etc., being neglected. The light and shade on the single figures also is not expressed, but the light and shade effect of the whole picture is carefully shown, and the same with the color-scheme. It is this first sketch that establishes the character of the future picture in everything but the details. Sometimes this work is done on a quite large canvas, but usually is not more than a foot or two long, and of corresponding width.

=Studies.=--After this there must be studies made for the drawing of the single figures, and for more exactness of line and action in the bringing of all together into the whole. This work is usually done in charcoal, from the life, and sometimes on a piece of drawing-paper stretched over the same canvas that the picture will be painted on, or otherwise arranged, but of the same size. Often, however, this work, too, is done on a smaller scale than that of the picture, especially when the picture is to be very large. This is based on the preliminary sketch as composition, and is intended to carry that idea out more in full, and perfect the drawing of the different figures, and to harmonize the composition. The composition and relation of figures both as to size and position on the final canvas depend on this study.

[Ill.u.s.tration: =Study of Fortune.= _Michael Angelo._]

=Corrections.=--In making these studies and in transferring them to the canvas, corrections are of course often necessary. The correction may or may not be satisfactory. To avoid too great confusion from the number of corrections in the same place, they are not made always directly on the study or canvas, but on a curtain of tissue paper dropped over it. The figure may be completely drawn, and is to be modified in whole or in part. The tissue paper receives the new drawing, and the old drawing shows through it, and the effect of the correction can be compared with that of the first idea. The study itself need not then be changed until the alteration which is satisfactory is found, as the process may be repeated as many times as necessary on the tissue paper, and the alterations finally embodied in the completed study.

=Figure Studies.=--The studies for the various single figures are now made in the nude from the model, generally a quarter or half life size--a careful, accurate light and shade drawing of every figure in the picture, the model being posed in the position determined on in the study just spoken of. Sometimes further single studies are made with the same models draped, and generally special studies of drapery are made as well; these studies are afterwards used to place the figures in position on the canvas before the painting begins.

=Transferring.=--The composition study must now be transferred to the canvas, to give the general arrangement and relative position, size, and action of the figures, etc. If the drawing is the same size as the canvas it is done by tracing, if not, then it is "squared up." In this stage of the process mechanical exactness of proportion is the thing required, as well as the saving of time; all things having been planned beforehand, and freedom of execution coming in later. This establishes the proportions, the sizes, and positions of the several figures on the final canvas. The drawing is not at this stage complete. The more general relations only are the purpose of this.

Onto this preparation the studies drawn from the nude model are "squared up," and the drawing corrected again from the nude model.

This drawing is now covered with its drapery, which is drawn from the life in charcoal, or a _frottee_ of some sort. At this stage the canvas should represent, in monochrome, very justly, what the finished picture will be in composition, drawing, and light and shade. If the _frottee_ of various colors (as suggested in the chapter on "Still Life") has been used, the general color scheme will show also. This completes the preliminary process of the picture, and when the painting is begun with a _frottee_, this stage includes also the _first painting_.

="The ebouch."=--An _ebouch_ is a painting which, mainly with body color, blocks in broadly and simply the main ma.s.ses of a composition.

Sometimes an _ebouch_ is used as one of the preliminary color studies for a picture, especially if there is some problem of drapery ma.s.sing to be determined, or other motive purely of color and ma.s.s. Or if there is some piece of landscape detail such as a building or what not to come in, _ebouches_ for it will be made to be used in completing the picture. But more commonly the _ebouch_ is the first blocking-in painting of the picture, by means of which the greater ma.s.ses of color and value are laid onto the canvas, somewhat rudely, but strongly, so as to give a strong, firm impression of the picture, and a solid under-painting on which future work may be done. Whether this _ebouch_ is rough or smooth, just how much of it will be body or solid color and how much transparent, just what degree of finish this painting will have,--these depend on the man who does it. No two men work precisely the same way.

Some men make what is practically a large and very complete sketch.

Some paint quite smoothly or frankly, with more or less of an effect of being finished as they go, working from one side of the picture gradually across the whole canvas. Others work a bit here and a bit there, and fill in between as they feel inclined. Another way is to patch in little spots of rather pure color, so that the _ebouch_ looks like a sort of mosaic of paint.

In the matter of color, too, there is great difference of method. Some men lay in the picture with stronger color than they intend the finished picture to have, and gray it and bring it together with after-painting. Others go to the other extreme, and paint grayer and lighter, depending on glazings and full touches of color later on to richen and deepen the color. All the way between these two are modifications of method. The main difference between these extremes is that when stronger color is used in the first painting, the process is to paint with solid color all through; while if glazings are to be much used, the _ebouch_ must be lighter and quieter in color, to allow for the results of after-painting. For you cannot glaze _up_. You always glaze _down_. The glaze being a transparent color, used without white, will naturally make the color under it more brilliant in color, but darker in value, just as it would if you laid a piece of colored gla.s.s over it. And this result must be calculated on beforehand.

[Ill.u.s.tration: =ebouch of Portrait.= _Th. Robinson._ One sitting of one hour and a half.]

Which of all these methods is best to use depends altogether on which best suits the man and his purpose in the picture or his temperament.

A rough _ebouch_ will not make a smooth picture. A mosaic gives a pure, clear basis of color to gray down and work over, and may be sc.r.a.ped for a good surface. It is a deliberate method, and will be successful only with a thoughtful, deliberate painter. If a man is a timid colorist, a strong, even crude, under-painting will help to strengthen his color. A good colorist will get color any way. For a student, the more directly he puts down what he sees, the less he calculates on the effect of future after-painting, the better.

But whichever way a man works as to these various beginnings, the chief thing is, that he understand beforehand what are the peculiar advantages and qualities of each, and that he consider before he begins what he expects to do, and how he purposes to do it.

=Further Painting.=--The first painting may be put in from nature with the help of the several models in succession. More probably it will be put in from the color sketch which furnishes the general scheme, and from a number of studies and _ebouches_ which will give the princ.i.p.al material for each part of the canvas. With the next painting comes the more exact study from models and accessories themselves. The under-painting is in, the color relations and the contrasts of ma.s.ses, but all is more or less crude and undeveloped. Every one thing in the picture must be gradually brought to a further stage of completion.

The background is not as yet to be carried farther as a whole. If the canvas is all covered, so that the background effect is there, it is all that is needed as yet. The most important figures are to be painted, beginning with the heads and hands, and at the same time painting the parts next to them, the background and drapery close around them, so that the immediate values shall all be true as far as it has gone.

No small details are painted yet. The whole canvas is carried forward by painting all over it, no one thing being entirely finished; for the same degree of progress should be kept up for the whole picture. To finish any one part long before the rest is done, would be to run the risk of over-painting that part.

After the heads and other flesh parts, the draperies should be brought up, and the background and all objects in it painted, to bring the whole picture to the same degree of completion. This finishes the second painting. It is all done from nature direct, and is painted solidly as a rule. Even if the first painting has been a _frottee_ this one will have been solidly painted into that _frottee_, although the transparent rubbing may have been left showing, whenever it was true in effect; most probably in the shadows and broader dark ma.s.ses of the backgrounds. In this second painting no glazings or sc.u.mblings come in. The canvas is brought forward as far as possible with direct frank brush-work with body color before these other processes can be used. Glazes and such manipulations require a solid under-painting, and a comparative completion of the picture for safe work. These processes are for the modifying of color mainly; you do not draw nor represent the more important and fundamental facts of the picture with them. All these things are painted first, in the most frank and direct way, and then you can do anything you want to on a sure basis of well-understood representation. There will be structure underneath your future processes.

=The Third Painting.=--The third painting simply goes over the picture in the same manner as the second, but marking out more carefully the important details and enforcing the accuracy of features, or strengthening the accents of dark and bringing up those of the lights.

The procedure will, of course, be different, according as the picture was begun with an _ebouch_ of body color or a _frottee_ of transparent color. The third painting will, in either case, carry the picture as a whole further toward being finished.

=Rough and Smooth.=--If body color has been used pretty freely in the two first paintings, the surface of paint will be pretty rough in places by the time it is ready for the third painting. Whether that roughness is a thing to be got rid of or not is something for the painter to decide for himself. Among the greatest of painters there have always been men who painted smoothly and men who painted roughly.

I have considered elsewhere the subject of detail, but the question of detail bears on that of the roughness of the painting; for minute detail is not possible with much roughness of surface; the fineness of the stroke which secures the detail is lost in the corrugations of the heavier brush-strokes. The effect of color, and especially luminosity, has much to do with the way the paint is put on also, and all these things are to be considered. As a rule, it might be well to look upon either extreme as something not of importance in itself. The mere quality of smoothness on the canvas is of no consequence or value, any more than the mere quality of roughness is. If these things are necessary to or consequent upon the getting of certain other qualities which are justly to be considered worth striving for, then these qualities will be seen on the canvas, and will be all right. The painter will do well to look on them as something incidental merely to the picture. If he will simply work quite frankly, intent on the expression of what is true and vital to his picture, the question of the surface quality of his canvas will not bother him beyond the effect that it has upon his attaining of that expression.

=Sc.r.a.ping.=--The second painting will be well dry before the third begins, especially if the paint be more rough and uneven than is for any reason desirable. Almost every painter sc.r.a.pes his pictures more or less. There is pretty sure to be some part of it in which there is roughness just where he doesn't want it. For the third painting, that is to say, after the main things in the picture are practically entirely finished, there remains to be done the strengthening and richening and modifying of the colors, values, and accents, and the bringing of the whole picture together by a general overworking.

Before this begins, the picture may need sc.r.a.ping more or less all over. If it does need it, you may use a regular tool made for that purpose; or the blade of a razor may be used, it being held firmly in such a position that there is no danger of its cutting the canvas.

It is not necessary to sc.r.a.pe the paint smooth, but only to take off such projections and unevenness of paint as would interfere with the proper over-painting.

The third painting represents any and all processes that may be used to complete the picture. There is no rule as to the number of processes or "paintings." You may have a dozen paintings if you want them, and after the first two they are all modifications and subdivisions of the third painting; for they all add to furthering the completion of the picture. They are all done more or less from nature, as the second painting was. There should be very little done to any picture without constant reference to nature.

If you glaze your picture, glaze one part at a time. Don't "tone" it with a general wash of some color. That is not the way pictures are "brought into tone," nor is that the purpose of the glaze. The glaze, like any other application of paint, is put on just where it is needed to modify the color of that place where the color goes. The use of a sc.u.mble is the same; and both the glaze and the sc.u.mble will be painted into and over with solid color, and that again modified as much as is called for. The thing which is to be carefully avoided is not the use of any special process, but the ceasing from the use of some process or other before the thing is as it should be,--don't stop before the picture represents the best, the completest expression of the idea of the picture.

This completeness of expression may even go to the elimination of what is ordinarily looked upon as "finish." Finish is not surface, but expression; and completeness of expression may demand roughness and avoidance of detail and surface at one time quite as positively as it demands more detail and consequent smoothness at another.

And this final completeness comes from the last paintings which I group together as the "third." Sc.u.mble and glaze and paint into them, and glaze and sc.u.mble again. Use any process which will help your picture to have those qualities which are always essential to any picture being a good one. The qualities of line and ma.s.s, composition that is, you get from the first, or you never can get it at all. Those qualities of character, and truth of representation, and exactness of meaning, you get in the first paintings, together with the more general qualities of color and tone. Emphasis and force of accent, such detail as you want, and the final and more delicate perceptions of color and tone, you get in the third or last painting, which may be divided into several paintings.

=Between Paintings.=--When a painting is dry and you begin to work on it again, you will probably find parts of its surface covered with a kind of bluish haze, which quite changes its color or obscures the work altogether. It is "dried in." In drying, some of the oil of the last painting is absorbed by what is beneath it, and the dead haze is the result. You cannot paint on it without in some way bringing it back to its original color. You cannot varnish it out at this stage, for this will not have a good effect on your picture.

="Oiling Out."=--You can oil it all over, and then rub all the oil off that you can. This will bring it out. But the oil will tend to darken the picture; too much oil should be avoided. Turpentine with a little oil in it will bring it out also, but it will not stay out so long, but perhaps long enough for you to work on it. If you put a little siccative de Harlem in it, or use any picture varnish thinned with turpentine, it will serve well enough. There is a retouching varnish, _vernis a retoucher_, which is made for this purpose, and is perfectly safe and good.

The picture must be well dried before it is finally varnished.

CHAPTER x.x.xV

DIFFICULTIES OF BEGINNERS

All painters have difficulty with their pictures, but the trouble with the beginner is that he has not experience enough to know how to meet it. The solving of all difficulties is a matter of application of fundamental principles to them; but it is necessary to know these principles, and to have applied them to simple problems, before one can know how to apply them to less simple ones.

I have tried to deal fully with these principles rather than to tell how to do any one thing, and to point out the application whenever it could be done.

There are, however, some things that almost always bother the beginner, and it may be helpful to speak of them particularly.

=Selection of Subject.=--One of the chief objections to copying as a method of beginning study is that while it teaches a good deal about surface-work, it gives no practical training just when it is most needed. The student who has only copied has no idea how to look for a composition, how to place it on his canvas, or how to translate into line and color the actual forms which he sees in nature. These things are all done for him in the picture he is copying, yet these are the very first things he should have practised in. The making of a picture begins before the drawing and painting begins. You see something out-doors, or you see a group of people or a single person in an interesting position. It is one thing to see it; how are you practically to grasp it so as to get it on canvas? That is quite a different thing. How much shall you take in? How much leave out? What proportion of the canvas shall the main object or figure take up? All these are questions which need some experience to answer.

In dealing with figures experience comes somewhat naturally, because you will of course not undertake more than a head and shoulders, with a plain background, for your first work. The selecting of subject in this is chiefly the choice of lighting and position of head, which have been spoken of elsewhere; and the placing of them on the canvas should be reduced to the making of the head as large as it will come conveniently. The old rule was that the point of the nose should be about the middle of the canvas, and in most cases on the ordinary canvas this brings the head in the right place. As you paint more you will put in more and more of the figure, and so progress comes very naturally.

But in landscape you are more than likely to be almost helpless at first. There is so much all around you, and so little saliency, that it is hard to say where to begin and where to leave off. Practice in still life will help you somewhat, but still things in nature are seldom arranged with that centralization which makes a subject easy to see. Even the simplicity which is sometimes obvious is, when you come to paint it, only the more difficult to handle because of its simplicity. The simplicity which you should look for to make your selection of a subject easy is not the lack of something to draw, but the definiteness of some marked object or effect. What is good as a "view" is apt to be the reverse of suitable for a picture. You want something tangible, and you do not want too much or too little of it.

A long line of hill with a broad field beneath it, for instance, is simple enough, but what is there for you to take hold of? In an ordinary light it is only a few broad planes of value and color without an accent object to emphasize or centre on. It can be painted, of course, and can be made a beautiful picture, but it is a subject for a master, not for a student. But suppose there were a tree or a group of trees in the field; suppose a ma.s.s of cloud obscured the sky, and a ray of sunlight fell on and around the tree through a rift in the clouds. Or suppose the opposite of this. Suppose all was in broad light, and the tree was strongly lighted on one side, on the other shadowed, and that it threw a ma.s.s of shadow below and to one side of it. Immediately there is something which you can take hold of and make your picture around. The field and hill alone will make a study of distance and middle distance and foreground, but it would not make an effective sketch. The two effects I have supposed give the possibility for a sketch at once, and what suggests a sketch suggests a picture.

This central object or effect which I have supposed also clears up the matter of the placing of your subject on the canvas. With merely the hill and plain you might cut it off anywhere, a mile or two one side or the other would make little or no difference to your picture. But the tree and the effect of light decide the thing for you. The tree and the lighting are the central idea of the picture. Very well, then, make them large enough on your canvas to be of that importance. Then what is around them is only so much more as the canvas will hold, and you will place the tree where, having the proper proportionate size, it will also "compose well" and make the canvas balance, being neither in the middle exactly nor too much to one side.

Here are two photographs taken in the same field and of the same view, with the camera pointed in the same direction in both. One shows the lack of saliency, although the tree is there. In the other the camera was simply carried forward a hundred yards or so, until the tree became large enough to be of importance in the composition. The placing is simply a better position with reference to the tree in this case.

=Centralize.=--Now, as you go about looking for things to sketch, look always for some central object or effect. If you find that what seems very beautiful will not give you anything definite and graspable,--some contrast of form, or light and shade, or color,--don't attempt it. The thing is beautiful, and has doubtless a picture in it, but not for you. You are learning how to look for and to find a subject, and you must begin with what is readily sketched, without too much subtlety either of form or color or value.

=Placing.=--Having found your subject with something definite in it, you must place it on your canvas so that it "tells." It will not do to put it in haphazard, letting any part of it come anywhere as it happens. You will not be satisfied with the effect of this. The object of a picture is to make visible something which you wish to call attention to; to show something that seems to you worth looking at.

Then you must arrange it so that that particular something is sure to be seen whether anything else is seen or not. This is the first thing to be thought of in placing your subject. _Where_ is it to come on the canvas? How much room is it to take up? If it is too large, there is not enough surrounding it to make an interesting whole. If it is to be emphasized, it must have something to be emphasized with reference to. On the other hand, if it is too small, its very size makes it insignificant.

[Ill.u.s.tration: =Landscape Photo. No. 1.=]