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The Elements of Drawing by John RuskinOn First Practice
Sketching from Nature
On Color and Composition
ON color AND COMPOSITION
I have only one thing more to advise you, namely, never to color petulantly or hurriedly. You will not, indeed, be able, if you attend properly to your coloring, to get anything like the quantity of form you could in a chiaroscuro sketch; nevertheless, if you do not dash or rush at your work, nor do it lazily, you may always get enough form to be satisfactory. An extra quarter of an hour, distributed in quietness over the course of the whole study, may just make the difference between a quite intelligible drawing, and a slovenly and obscure one. If you determine well beforehand what outline each piece of color is to have, and, when it is on the paper,
guide it without nervousness, as far as you can, into the form
required; and then, after it is dry, consider thoroughly what touches
are needed to complete it, before laying one of them on; you will be
surprised to find how masterly the work will soon look, as compared
with a hurried or ill-considered sketch. In no process that I know
of — least of all in sketching — can time be really gained by
precipitation. It is gained only by caution; and gained in all sorts
of ways; for not only truth of form, but force of light, is always
added by an intelligent and shapely laying of the shadow colors. You
may often make a simple flat tint, rightly gradated and edged, express
a complicated piece of subject without a single retouch. The two Swiss
cottages, for instance, with their balconies, and glittering windows,
and general character of shingly eaves, are expressed in Fig. 30
with one tint of grey, and a few dispersed spots and lines of it; all
of which you ought to be able to lay on without more than thrice
dipping your brush, and without a single touch after the tint is dry.
Here, then, for I cannot without colored illustrations tell you more, I must leave you to follow out the subject for yourself, with such help as you may receive from the water-color drawings accessible to you; or from any of the little treatises on their art which have been published lately by our water-color painters. But do not trust much to works of this kind. You may get valuable hints from them as to mixture of colors; and here and there you will find a useful artifice or process explained; but nearly all such books are written only to help idle amateurs to a meretricious skill, and they are full of precepts and principles which may, for the most part, be interpreted by their precise negatives, and then acted upon with advantage. Most of them praise boldness, when the only safe attendant spirit of a beginner is caution; — advise velocity, when the first condition of success is deliberation; — and plead for generalisation, when all the foundations of power must be laid in knowledge of speciality.
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