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The Elements of Drawing by John RuskinOn First Practice
Sketching from Nature
On Color and Composition
SKETCHING FROM NATURE
Fig. 20 will give you a good idea of the simplest way in
which these and other such facts can be rapidly expressed; if you copy
it carefully, you will be surprised to find how the touches all group
together, in expressing the plumy toss of the tree branches, and the
springing of the bushes out of the bank, and the undulation of the
ground: note the careful drawing of the footsteps made by the climbers
of the little mound on the left.* It is facsimiled from an etching of
* [Fig. 20 is a portion of "Sheep-washing: Windsor from Slough,"
an unpublished plate for Liter Studiorum: see below, p 109 p. 99. The
drawing is No. 880 in the National Gallery. "Salt Hill" was the scene
of the Eton "Montem."]Turner's, and is as good an example as you can have of the use of pure
and firm lines; it will also show you how the particular action in
foliage, or anything else to which you wish to direct attention, may
be intensified by the adjuncts. The tall and upright trees are made to look more tall and upright still, because their line is continued below by the figure of the farmer with his stick; and the rounded bushes on the bank are made to look more rounded because their line is
continued in one broad sweep by the black dog and the boy climbing the
wall. These figures are placed entirely with this object, as we shall
see more fully hereafter when we come to talk about composition; but, if
you please, we will not talk about that yet awhile. What I have been
telling you about the beautiful lines and action of foliage has
nothing to do with composition, but only with fact, and the brief and
expressive representation of fact. But there will be no harm in your
looking forward, if you like to do so, to the account, in Letter III.,
of the "Law of Radiation," and reading what is said there about tree
growth: indeed it would in some respects have
been better to have said it here than there, only it would have broken
up the account of the principles of composition somewhat awkwardly.
Now, although the lines indicative of action are not always quite so manifest in other things as in trees, a little attention will soon enable you to see that there are such lines in everything. In an old house roof, a bad observer and bad draughtsman will only see and draw the spotty irregularity of tiles or slates all over; but a good draughtsman will see all the bends of the under timbers, where they are weakest and the weight is telling on them most, and the tracks of the run of the water in time of rain, where it runs off fastest, and where it lies long and feeds the moss; and he will be careful, however few slates he draws, to mark the way they bend together towards those hollows (which have the future fate of the roof in them), and crowd gradually together at the top of the gable, partly diminishing in perspective, partly, perhaps, diminished on purpose (they are so in most English old houses) by the slate-layer. So in ground, there is always the direction of the run of the water to be noticed, which rounds the earth and cuts it into hollows; and, generally, in any bank or height worth drawing, a trace of bedded or other internal structure besides. Figure 20 will give you some idea of the way in which such facts may be expressed by a few lines. Do you not feel the depression in the ground all down the hill where the footsteps are, and how the people always turn to the left at the top, losing breath a little, and then how the water runs down in that other hollow towards the valley, behind the roots of the trees?
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