Color Techniques

On First Practice
Sketching from Nature
On Color and Composition

ON color AND COMPOSITION

If you once begin to slur, or change, or sketch, or try this way and that with your color, it is all over with it and with you. You will continually see bad copyists trying to imitate the Venetians, by daubing their colors about, and retouching, and finishing, and softening: when every touch and every added hue only lead them farther into chaos. There is a dog between two children in a Veronese in the Louvre, which gives the copyists much employment. He has a dark ground behind him, which Veronese has painted first, and then when it was dry, or nearly so, struck the locks of the dog's white hair over it with some half-dozen curling sweeps of his brush, right at once, and for ever. Had one line or hair of them gone wrong, it would have been wrong for ever; no retouching could have mended it. The poor copyists daub in first some background, and then some dog's hair; then retouch the background, then the hair; work for hours at it, expecting it always to come right tomorrow — " when it is finished." They may work for centuries at it, and they will never do it. If they can do it with Veronese's allowance of work, half a dozen sweeps of the hand over the dark background, well; if not, they may ask the dog himself whether it will ever come right, and get true answer from him — on Launce's conditions: "If he say 'ay,' it will; if he say no,' it will; if he shake his tail and say nothing, it will."

(3.) Whenever you lay on a mass of color, be sure that however large it may be, or however small, it shall be gradated. No color exists in Nature under ordinary circumstances without gradation. If you do not see this, it is the fault of your inexperience: you will see it in due time, if you practise enough. But in general you may see it at once. In the birch trunk, for instance, the rosy grey must be gradated by the roundness of the stem till it meets the shaded side; similarly the shaded side is gradated by reflected light. Accordingly, whether by adding water, or white paint, or by unequal force of touch (this you will do at pleasure, according to the texture you wish to produce), you must, in every tint you lay on, make it a little paler at one part than another, and get an even gradation between the two depths.
This is very like laying down a formal law or recipe for you; but you will find it is merely the assertion of a natural fact. It is not indeed physically impossible to meet with an ungradated piece of color, but it is so supremely improbable, that you had better get into the habit of asking yourself invariably, when you are going to copy a tint — not "Is that gradated? "but" Which way is that gradated? " and at least in ninety-nine out of a hundred instances, you will be able to answer decisively after a careful glance, though the gradation may have been so subtle that you did not see it at first. And it does not matter how small the touch of color may be, though not larger than the smallest pin's head, if one part of it is not darker than the rest, it is a bad touch; for it is not merely because the natural fact is so, that your color should be gradated; the preciousness and pleasantness of the color itself depends more on this than on any other of its qualities, for gradation is to colors just what curvature is to lines, both being felt to be beautiful by the pure instinct of every human mind, and both, considered as types, expressing the law of gradual change and progress in the human soul itself.
What the difference is in mere beauty between a gradated and ungradated color, may be seen easily by laying an even tint of rose-color on paper, and putting a rose leaf beside it. The victorious beauty of the rose as compared with other flowers, depends wholly on the delicacy and quantity of its color gradations, 1 all other flowers being either less rich in gradation, not having so many folds of leaf; or less tender, being patched and veined instead of flushed.

(4.) But observe, it is not enough in general that color should be gradated by being made merely paler or darker at one place than another. Generally color changes as it diminishes, and is not merely darker at one spot, but also purer at one spot than anywhere else. It does not in the least follow that the darkest spot should be the purest; still less so that the lightest should be the purest. Very often the two gradations more or less cross each other, one passing in one direction from paleness to darkness, another in another direction from purity to dulness, but there will almost always be both of them, however reconciled; and you must never be satisfied with a piece of color until you have got both: that is to say, every piece of blue that you lay on must be quite blue only at some given spot, nor that a large spot; and must be gradated from that into less pure blue, — greyish blue, or greenish blue, or purplish blue, — over all the rest of the space it occupies. And this you must do in one of three ways: either, while the color is wet, mix with it the color which is to subdue it, adding gradually a little more and a little more; or else, when the color is quite dry, strike a gradated touch of another color over it, leaving only a point of the first tint visible; or else, lay the subduing tints on in small touches, as in the exercise of tinting the chess-board.

Continue to Color Gradation

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