

and shading on after ; this wil 

 and less iTiess\- effect. 



ha\e a far better 



I have cautioned you against the indiscriminate use of wliite, 

 and now I must add a word of warning about black as well. One 

 of the most usual mistakes a beginner makes is that, in his anxiety 

 to make a forcible study, he will put in the darkest 

 part with a strong, hard black, quite out of keeping 

 with the general tone of the drawing. 

 / .^ I remember the time when I was a \er\- big 



""■A,, ""^ offender in this way myself, and can recall with 

 amusement an early attempt at portraiture, when, 

 with the idea of giving expression and beauty to the 

 dark eyes of my sitter (a patient and long-suffering 

 cousin), I made them so staringly black that one 

 of my family critics aptly remarked, they looked " like two holes burnt 

 in a blanket ! " 



This was not the only case. Anxious to get a strong efiect, I intro- 

 duced little bits of pure black in all my flower groups as well, with such 

 appalling results that one daj' my uncle kindly but firmlj' abstracted the 

 offending pigment from my box, advising me to try how I could get 

 along without it. And although for a time I missed it sorely, I found 

 ultimately I could do so well without its aid, that I have never used it 

 in my flower studies since. I find that even in the deepest parts, a 

 mixture of cobalt and vandyke brown will give me quite as dark a tone 

 as I am likely to require. 



There is very little hard black or crude white in Nature as we see it : 

 even a piece of pure white paper cannot appear purely white to our sight, 

 for outside influences and conditions modify it to a great extent, a shade 

 here, a reflection there. In the same way a black object is never purely 

 black, but is subject to great variations of tone resulting from the 

 proximity of objects around, which rellect different colours into its 

 surface and texture. 



In looking at a mass of white flowers how much do we see that is 

 really without colour and tone ? The mass must give the effect of white, 

 and broadly speaking it is white, but so tempered by modelling, te.xture, 

 reflection, and shadow as to only show really white on the points 

 where the light fails 

 strongest. It requires 

 great caution, great 

 restraint, to see this 



and not overdo it: ^ . • ^"^ ^__^. 



remember it is a 

 mass of light in the 



92 



