Color and Materials

On First Practice
Sketching from Nature
On Color and Composition

COLOR - MATERIALS

And, first, of materials. Use hard cake colors, 2 not moist colors: grind a sufficient quantity of each on your palette every morning, keeping a separate plate, large and deep, for colors to be used in broad washes, and wash both plate and palette every evening, so as to be able always to get good and pure color when you need it; and force yourself into cleanly and orderly habits about your colors. The two best colorists of modern times, Turner and Rossetti,* afford us, I am sorry to say, no confirmation of this precept by their * I give Rossetti this preeminence, because, though the leading Pre-Raphaelites have all about equal power over color in the abstract, Rossetti and Holman Hunt are distinguished above the rest for rendering color under effects of light; and of these two, Rossetti composes with richer fancy, and with a deeper sense of beauty, Hunt's stern realism leading him continually into harshness. Rossetti's carelessness, to do him justice, is only in water-color, never in oil. practice. Turner was, and Rossetti is, as slovenly in all their procedures as men can well be; but the result of this was, with Turner, that the colors have altered in all his pictures, and in many of his drawings; and the result of it with Rossetti is, that though his colors are safe, he has sometimes to throw aside work that was half done, and begin over again. William Hunt, of the Old Water-color, is very neat in his practice; so, I believe, is Mulready; so is John Lewis; and so are the leading Pre-Raphaelites, Rossetti only excepted. And there can be no doubt about the goodness of the advice, if it were only for this reason, that the more particular you are about your colors the more you will get into a deliberate and methodical habit in using them, and all true speed in coloring comes of this deliberation.

Use Chinese white, well ground, to mix with your colors in order to pale them, instead of a quantity of water. You will thus be able to shape your masses more quietly, and play the colors about with more ease; they will not damp your paper so much, and you will be able to go on continually, and lay forms of passing cloud and other fugitive or delicately shaped lights, otherwise unattainable except by time.

This mixing of white with the pigments, so as to render them opaque, constitutes body-color drawing as opposed to transparent-color drawing, and you will, perhaps, have it often said to you that this body-color is "illegitimate." It is just as legitimate as oil-painting, being, so far as handling is concerned, the same process, only without its uncleanliness, its unwholesomeness, or its inconvenience; for oil will not dry quickly, nor carry safely, nor give the same effects of atmosphere without tenfold labour. And if you hear it said that the body-color looks chalky or opaque, and, as is very likely, think so yourself, be yet assured of this, that though certain effects of glow and transparencies of gloom are not to be reached without transparent * All the degradation of art which was brought about, after the rise of the Dutch school, by asphaltum, yellow varnish, and brown trees1 would have been prevented, if only painters had been forced to work in dead color. Any color will do for some people, if it is browned and shining; but fallacy in dead color is detected on the instant. I even believe that whenever a painter begins to wish that he could touch any portion of his work with gum, he is going wrong. It is necessary, however, in this matter, carefully to distinguish between translucency and lustre. Translucency, though, as I have said above, a dangerous temptation, is, in its place, beautiful; but lustre or shininess is always, in painting, a defect. Nay, one of my best painter-friends (the " best being understood to attach to both divisions of that awkward compound word), tried the other day to persuade me that lustre was an ignobleness in anything; and it was only the fear of treason to ladies' eyes, and to mountain streams, and to morning dew, which kept me from yielding the point to him. One is apt always to generalise too quickly in such matters; but there can be no question that lustre is destructive of loveliness in color, as it is of intelligibility in form. Whatever may be the pride of a young beauty in the knowledge that her eyes shine (though perhaps even eyes are most beautiful in dimness), she would be sorry if her cheeks did; and which of us would wish to polish a rose? color, those glows and glooms are not the noblest aim of art. After many years study of the various results of fresco and oil painting in Italy, and of body-color and transparent color in England, I am now entirely convinced that the greatest things that are to be done in art must be done in dead color. The habit of depending on varnish or on lucid tints for transparency, makes the painter comparatively lose sight of the nobler translucence which is obtained by breaking various colors amidst each other: and even when, as by Correggio, exquisite play of hue is joined with exquisite transparency, the delight in the depth almost always leads the painter into mean and false chiaroscuro; it leads him to like dark backgrounds instead of luminous ones,* and to enjoy, in general, quality of color more than grandeur of composition, and confined light rather than open sunshine: so that the really greatest thoughts of the greatest men have always, so far as I remember, been reached in dead color, and the noblest oil pictures of Tintoret and Veronese are those which are likest frescoes.

Besides all this, the fact is, that though sometimes a little chalky and coarse-looking body-color is, in a sketch, infinitely liker Nature than transparent color: the bloom and mist of distance are accurately and instantly represented by the film of opaque blue (quite accurately, I think, by nothing else); and for ground, rocks, and buildings, the earthy and solid surface is, of course, always truer than the most finished and carefully wrought work in transparent tints can ever be.

Continue to Using the Right Color

Get all the animals listed on this site in an easily printable format. BONUS: Also learn how to draw mice, monkeys, butterflies and a phoenix. Instant download. $3.95