CHAPTER XIII

PAINTING FROM LIFE IN MONOCHROME

To resume our painting.

If now you feel that you can sit in your saddle and know how to hold your reins, you may begin to trot. Paint from the living model, at first in monochrome. It is wiser to attack your difficulties one by one, until you are accustomed to them.

There is always something disconcerting in painting from the living model, and since the sense of solidity, and subtle modelling, are due to the relation of tones, it is well to cultivate the habit of reducing every part and every colour to its equivalent tone value.

Induce a patient relation or friend to sit for you. A professional model will give you the least trouble, should no one be anxious to sacrifice himself for your welfare. The head of an old person will be less embarrassing than that of a young one.

Study the lighting of heads by Velazquez and Van Dyck. A reproduction of one of them pinned on your easel, above the canvas, might well serve you as a guide. Arrange your sitter in a similar [106] lighting and position, for you could have no better mentor than a good example of either master.

Do not hesitate to hold your brush against your model's face to ascertain its length, and make your study slightly smaller than life.

Draw and then shade in charcoal, and use a dry brush to model with. From time to time place your drawing alongside your sitter, on a level with, and as near as possible to, the face, and go back as far as you can to compare the drawing with nature, through the hand-glass.

My reason for advising you to keep your drawing in a line with the face is to obviate the doubt that often arises when the picture is nearer to one than the sitter, and, on examination in the glass, it appears to be on too large a scale, even though you know it to measure less than life.

Make all corrections while you can in the charcoal stage. Charcoal offers little resistance to a brush, and none whatever to bread. It is reckless in the extreme to put down paint with obvious errors in construction or drawing. Never fear ! there will be perplexities enough to contend with, in every case ; and much correcting in paint is fatal to lucidity.

Set the palette with raw umber, and the softer white, and use turpentine. One painting will not suffice to complete the study, so paint with the idea of going over it at least three or four times.

The instructions given for the painting from the cast will answer here, but the hair, eyes, and local colour _{Footnote: By "local colour" is understood the actual colour of the part, unaffected by any modifying accidents-such as the red of the lips. the pink tones of the ear, &c.} [107] will require different treatment when you are working from life.

The flesh and skin are pulpy and transparent, not at all like the plaster of the cast. But at the outset, think only of the main planes, painting the hair and eyes in their middle tones.

The raw umber may not give you all the depth you see, but the pure colour will be deep enough for your present purpose. Additional colours would hamper you. And it is good practice to make the best of restricted materials. When you have laid in the shadows and half-tone, the lighter and darker passages in the hair and eyes, and have translated the local colour of the cheeks, ears, mouth, and so on, into their corresponding tone value, look to the edges, against the back-ground. Your half-closed eyes will discover for you the parts of the outline which tend to lose themselves in the background. Lose and find the outline to rid the edges of any sense of hardness, and so suggest the turning towards the planes beyond. Take care not to soften the outline away all through, or woolliness will result, and the light and solidity will suffer. While the paint of the setting as well as that of the flesh is wet, little softening of the lighter parts of the outline is necessary.

Let us take two extreme examples of the treatment [108] of outline in paint. The work of Carlo Dolci is an instance of over-modelling. It therefore lacks solidity, is fluffy, and has no light playing over the surface of the planes which are no less over-graduated.

With Velazquez, on the other hand, the edges are not so completely lost ; the planes are distinct ; and light plays over the surfaces.

In the treatment of the hair against the forehead, the same discrimination is necessary, or the hair may look like a wig.

Mark the quality of the skin that covers the bones of the forehead and the bridge of the nose, and the contrasted pulpiness of the more mobile flesh that is free of the bone.

Should the sitter be wearing any white material round the neck or shoulders, see that the value of your flesh colours contiguous to such white passages is by contrast right in general tone. The lower planes of the cheek, as well as of the chin, receding as they sometimes do from the light, are more often than not quite low in tone. The white material itself varies also according to its being parallel to or receding from the source of light.

Be careful in modelling round the eyes to preserve the globular feeling beneath the lids, and to realise something of the liquid quality of the eyes themselves.

If your study appears, on examination in the glass, to be fairly well constructed and painted [109] thinly enough to show the grain of the canvas, and you wish to take it up again, use your palette knife sparingly just to lighten the darks of the background, hair, and shadows. Should any objectionable hardness or thinness be apparent, soften with a large dry brush, and so prepare for the next sitting. Should this be the following day, place the canvas near the stove. Being thinly painted, it will, if kept warm, in all probability be sufficiently dry.

Before attempting to work again on the study, examine it carefully beside the model. Your fresh eye will detect any errors in the proportion or construction. Look to it that the map of light and shade be correct, and should you find it necessary to make alterations, such as increasing the width of the face, which should cut further into the background, or change any shadow passages into lighter ones, take your penknife and scrape away the dark paint before making corrections in colour. At this stage the penknife makes an excellent drawing instrument.

Some parts of the study may perhaps dry "dead." Before oiling them out, breathe on the canvas ; and afterwards wipe off the linseed or poppy oil with a rag. Poppy oil, by the way, dries more slowly than the other oils.

Now repeat the process of the first day, covering the whole with wet paint afresh, using the first painting merely as a guide, as so many points of departure. Do not be tempted to leave any [110] of the underlying tones uncovered. The whole of the surface is to be a new one, otherwise there will be no scope for freedom of brushwork, and the general result will be thin, dry, and poor.

Endeavour to intensify the character, strengthen the drawing, and approach still more closely the tone values of the parts, while keeping the lights clear and the whole bathed in light.

When M. Léon Bonnat was asked by a pupil who thought he had completed his study what he was to do next, his reply was : " Make it more like." "And then?" asked the pupil. "Then make it still more like ! " was the retort.

It is given to few men, even accomplished masters, to be able to realise the character of their sitters in one, two, or even three attempts. And the student must be more exacting than the master, or he will never be a master.

Above all things, value your work in the making but lightly. Be bold to efface and renew, and take encouragement from the thought that you may learn more from honest failure than from mild success.

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