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The Elements of Drawing by John RuskinOn First Practice
Sketching from Nature
On Color and Composition
SKETCHING FROM NATURE
Fourthly. You will find it of great use, whatever kind of landscape scenery you are passing through, to get into the habit of making memoranda of the shapes of shadows. You will find that many objects of no essential interest in themselves, and neither deserving a finished study, nor a Dureresque one, may yet become of singular value in consequence of the fantastic shapes of their shadows; for it
happens often, in distant effect, that the shadow is by much a more
important element than the substance. Thus, in the Alpine bridge,
Fig. 21, seen within a few yards of it, as in the figure, the
arrangement of timbers to which the shadows are owing is perceptible;
but at half a mile's distance, in bright sunlight, the timbers would
not be seen; and a good painter's expression of the bridge would be
merely the large spot, and the crossed bars, of pure grey; wholly
without indication of their cause, as in Fig. 22 a; and if we
saw it at still greater distances, it would appear as in Fig. 22 b
and c, diminishing at last to a strange, unintelligible,
spider-like spot of grey on the light hillside.
A perfectly great painter, throughout his distances, continually
reduces his objects to these shadow abstracts; and the singular, and
to many persons unaccountable, effect of the confused touches in
Turner's distances, is owing chiefly to this thorough accuracy and
intense meaning of the shadow abstracts.
Studies of this kind are easily made, when you are in haste, with an F. or HB. pencil: it requires some hardness of the point to ensure your drawing delicately enough when the forms of the shadows are very subtle; they are sure to be so somewhere, and are generally so everywhere. The pencil is indeed a very precious instrument after you are master of the pen and brush, for the pencil, cunningly used, is both, and will draw a line with the precision of the one and the gradation of the other; nevertheless, it is so unsatisfactory to see the sharp touches, on which the best of the detail depends, getting gradually deadened by time, or to find the places where force was wanted look shiny, and like a fire-grate, that I should recommend rather the steady use of the pen, or brush, and color, whenever time admits of it; keeping only a small memorandum-book in the breast-pocket, with its well-cut, sheathed pencil, ready for notes on passing opportunities: but never being without this.
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