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3. Seeing Things—and Feeling Them— In Terms of Your Medium

It may be as well to enlarge upon the rather broad generalizations made previously about the art of seeing life in terms of the particular medium you are using to re-create or express your views. In this case it is the fluid medium of water colors taken from tubes of moist color and used with pointed brushes or, for large washes, flat ones.

Nowadays the whole technique of water-color paint­ing has been enlarged and extended. You have absolute freedom to do as you please. According to most con­temporary painters, you should aim to express through your medium some new idea or new vision that you, and you alone, can see. The camera can so well record the actual visible appearance of things and report the multitude of detail in conveying the representation of scenes and objects, that it has become accepted that the main function of a drawing or painting is to con­vey the artist's emotional reactions, his feelings, about a scene or an object.

So do not think that you have to portray accurately the things in front of you. Do not be afraid to exag­gerate, to emphasize, to underline and stress whatever feature appeals to you. You may think you are exag­gerating hopelessly, yet when you look at the finished result you find that you have been very temperate—it seems almost impossible to exaggerate sufficiently. You see a line sloping down, you think perhaps that you have made it even more sloping, in your sketch, than the one you see before you, but standing back and looking again you may find that it is not slanting nearly enough. And it is the same with all sorts of drawing and painting—one always errs on the timid side, making curves too feeble, colors too light, con­trasts insufficiently pronounced.

So do not for a moment think of producing a pretty water color or concentrate solely on technique—think fervently and all the time of your subject, of what is thrilling you and urging you to express your feelings. If you fasten your emotion and thought upon the sub­ject and try to forget how you are going to re-create it on your paper, you will find that the means of doing the job will come to you as if by magic. You will dip your brush in plenty of water and mix up plenty of paint—whereas if you are considering nothing but tech­nique, you will be so hesitant that you will use too littie water and mix less of each color than you need. It always pays to err on the side of generosity. Meanness never pays in art. You may have to be wasteful, to mix more than you eventually need, to discard sketches, to try again and again. But it is the generous spirit that will prevail. It is as though art were linked with giving and not with getting, that the spirit must be moved to express itself lavishly, in order to do good work in art. There are many things that you will feel you would like to paint, which it is impossible to do on the spot. For these subjects you will need to use notes and sketches from your books, and work at home. In other words you will be training your visual memory-helped by all the rough ideas, outlines, scribbled notes, that you are able to make.

HOW TO USE NOTES, SKETCHES, AND MEMORY

Memory drawing comes easily to some people—the more subjective type of person. To the complete extro­vert or "looking-outward" type of mind, the power to memorize, when not in front of the subject, is very difficult to acquire. The chief thing to bear in mind is that you must put down just those things you do really remember and leave it at that, not over-elaborate with details that you think should be there, but are not re­membered. The simpler the result the better: if it is just two shapes together, two contrasting colors, that is all you need put into your picture. Do not try to please other people—just express what remains in your mind of what you have seen. For these reasons, the rough sketches you make should be only of the main masses; if you wish to convey action, just draw one line from the head to the foot and another for the other leg-catch the swing of the stride. Make another small sketch, with a definite outline of the shape, say 3 inches by 2 inches, which you intend to fill, and indicate within this the shapes of the dark and light masses—in other words give a sort of geometrical pattern that your picture will form when reduced to its elements, a dia­gram on a small scale which you can keep in mind when you enlarge your picture. Thus you have the keynote of your picture, two figures with contrasting colors and shapes that go well one with the other, a line or two indicating action and the main masses reduced to dark and light. See Figures 6 and 7. You can enlarge your space in proportion and begin to sketch in more detail the things you remember, first of all in black and white with a soft pencil or a chalk and then with color. Memory sketching can be very good fun and should be kept as fun and not made over-serious. You may wake up in the morning with a very vivid memory of a dream that took a peculiarly pictorial form. Try your hand at expressing that dream on paper. Keep to just the things you remember. The memory acts as a sieve and the unwanted things are forgotten, the essentials retained. Concentrate on giving the "feel" of the dream in your color scheme, and all its odd distortions of shapes or peculiarity of forms.

figure 6. Just catch the action you remember.

When you come to making a picture at home from a scene that you have had the time to sketch in detail in your sketch book—a scene that you had not the time or opportunity to paint on the spot, but which you desire to carry further—your written notes should be alongside your drawing. See Figure 8. Your chief task will be the enlargement of the facts you have be­fore you. Use a sheet of paper which is in proportion to your drawing. Mark on your sketch squares in pen­cil, say of one inch (see Illustration 3), and then—if your picture is to be four times as big—make corre­sponding squares on your paper twice the size, i.e., two-inch squares. Now you are able to fill in the parts of your original drawing on the enlarged space, square by square, thus keeping easily and accurately to the pro­portions of your original.

figure 7. Remember the division of light and dark, and the main action, and work up your picture from that.

This sketching-in process should be done with a 2B pencil quite lightly and deli­cately. You now have to rely upon your memory of the colors and of the intensity of each color. Try to visualize where the light was coming from, so that you have your darks and high lights in their appropriate places.

You may start with the sky, or you may put a light wash of, say, yellow ocher—using plenty of water and a big brush—all over the picture. When this is almost dry you may put in your cobalt blue tint or a touch of viridian green or light red, or whatever color you wish, seeing that these colors are in their right places and using the rag to wipe the color from the brush and dry off any running color. After the sky and your "overall" tint have dried, you may start on the land, or trees, or buildings, leaving your very slightly tinted paper to serve for your high lights and working always toward the darkest tints, which go in last.

figure 8. Road scene: rough sketch for water color. Marginal notes in sketch book: "Purple-blue road, soft dove-gray sky, deep green-black trees. Make special note of curves of road and angles of telegraph poles."

If there are any parts of your picture about which you lack sketches or notes or even a memory picture, do not struggle to fill up these areas, but leave them as they are until you have an opportunity of going again to the scene or some similar one and then concentrate on making mental notes of the part or parts you have left unrealized. If such an opportunity does not occur leave the picture and call it finished—it will be a better work of art than if you try to force it to a finish by put­ting in things you had not realized.

FIGURE SUBJECTS AND THE HEAD

Figure subjects are undoubtedly difficult if you expect accurate rendering of the human form. Water color is not the best medium in which to convey such detail as is necessary to portray human anatomy completely. But there is no need to take this view of accuracy. If human beings interest you and they are the "subject matter" you wish to paint, then forget accuracy, forget that you have never studied anatomy, or muscles, or sinews, or bone formations.

People are much more critical of drawings of people than they are of landscape and this fact makes many be­ginners forego trying to paint people. Again, I repeat, take no notice of the opinions or criticisms of your most intimate friends. Just please yourself first, last, and always.

If you feel like putting an oval for the face, an ob­long for the body, and two tubular shapes for the legs, by all means do so. If you compose these ovals, oblongs, and tubes into a pleasing pattern or arrangement on your paper and devise a good color scheme for your picture, you will achieve an interesting result. The prevalence of photography has given the artist more freedom to do as he wishes—to play with shapes and colors, and not to make accurate representations of things that the camera can do better.

To avoid getting overly self-conscious about paint­ing people is the difficulty. Constant observation is the surest means. Look often and notice the line and shape of people. Exaggeration is just what you need, for when you exaggerate a line you come far nearer to its reality than you imagine. It is well to remember that people have sides as well as fronts, that the body and the head are solid objects, not flat ones, although this does not matter at all if your intention is to portray them as simple flat shapes. But the solid three-dimen­sional aspect is often the one you may wish to convey, and this is naturally the hardest thing of all when it comes to painting faces and people.

If you think of the head as a box of a certain size and the body as another box, you will find it easier to get the idea of their "volume"—the fact that they have sides as well as front. So if you substitute for the oval mentioned previously an elongated box and for the ob­long body another box slightly larger and wider, you will have drawn the general form of the head and body. The legs and arms are four "tubes" fastened to the boxes. Thus you have your pictorial robot—the foundation upon which you can build all the complicated edifice of your complete human figure.

Keep in mind sphere, cube,& cylinder

figure 9. Figures.

The dia­grams (Figures 9 and 10) of the head and figure will help. You can make hundreds of these studies of action poses, with the legs and the arms disposed in various positions, and in this simple way get to know the move­ment and placing of the head and of the body with its appendages of arms and legs.

Naturally you will draw the figure with clothes added to the boxes and tubes, but if you have the un­derlying idea in mind, the clothes will be added with­out much difficulty. Unfortunately clothes are often made to hide the underlying form of the figure, but with a little practice you can soon see where the body lies beneath the clothes and just give a few strokes to convey the whereabouts of the limbs and the pose and action of the whole figure.

In the diagram of the head you will notice that the eyebrows are almost halfway down the oval of the whole head—in other words, the brain-box takes up half the structure of the head, seen as a total entity. Too many people give the forehead and hair, from the eyes to the top of the head, less height than it should occupy, which makes the drawing lack dignity. At first sight, the face seems all-important, but when one con­siders carefully the proportion of features to the whole structure of the head, one soon realizes that the cra­nium or brain-box is extremely important. If the right proportions are given from the outset, the details of eyes, nose, mouth, chin, etc., can be filled in quite rapidly.

The next thing to notice is the distinction between the front and the sides of the face. There is a very dis­tinct change in plane, although it may be scarcely no­ticeable in color, between the front part of the face, or body, and the sides. This matter of seeing the planes need not necessarily be overdone, but it should be kept in mind—and the change of plane searched for— otherwise the work will look flat and lack the feeling of construction that gives substance to even the slight­est sketch.

figure 10. Heads.

TREES

The same sort of thing applies to the drawing and painting of trees. The fact that they are round and stand as solid masses in the landscape should never be overlooked, although with trees the change from one plane to another is even harder to determine than with the human face. A tree grows upward, with great roots embedded in the earth, and there should be a feeling for this upward growth: the trunk must not seem to stick into the ground like a pole or stick. It has been said that the amount of wood in the main trunk of a tree divides up as the tree branches out to the sky—the amount of wood in the branches, when combined in girth, roughly equalling the total girth of the main trunk, and so on until one reaches the out­ermost twigs—at each division the bulk of the branch is approximately distributed among the smaller branches or twigs. Look at Figure 11.

TREES IN WINTER

The problem of portraying trees without their leaves is most complex, but you will find it much easier if you almost close your eyes and look at the masses of gray that compose the twigs in groups, see the different tones of gray, tinged perhaps with other colors, and put down the shapes of these various masses. Where the sky shows through them, they will be lighter and in certain parts almost as light as the surrounding sky —but not quite. If you make these patches with sky showing through the tree as light as the surrounding sky it will give a "jumpy" effect—so remember to tone down even the parts that you think are quite bright-tone them down to a slightly darker tint and the whole tree will come into focus without that effect of having "holes" in it which so often spoils paintings of trees in winter.

TREES IN SUMMER

The full foliage gives more mass, and the "solidity" of the tree is more readily discernible. Look for the groups of foliage, do not think of individual leaves, but concentrate on the patches of color that show the grouping of the various batches of leaves—put in the lightest parts, pale greens and browns, first, and then lead up to the dark shadows which are often almost purple—give the tree a pattern according to its growth. When you get to the parts that touch the sky you will notice that where dark colors come against the bright sky, the sky color appears even lighter and the dark a deeper tint, and that conversely where a light patch of foliage meets the sky, the sky color will need to be darker to show it up. The contours are therefore most important.

Note

figure ii. Trees.

The outline of where the tree meets the sky, or the woods behind, or the fields—it is at those points that careful observation should be made, for the contours make the picture, giving the sense of roundness, the sense of space between objects. Sensitive ren­dering of the contours is one of the deepest secrets of good representational painting. It is more important to see the way in which one thing (or to the artist, one shape) is outlined against another, than it is to see the thing itself. It is only by seeing what is behind an ob­ject that you can realize and express in your picture the shape of the thing itself. Spaces are of the utmost importance—look for spaces between, in, and around, the objects you are painting.

SKY

Painting sky is relatively easy. There are only one or two things that have to be borne in mind. The first is the fact that the sky is not a flat back-cloth, it is a curved surface. The colors at the horizon are quite dif­ferent from those halfway up in the picture—much more delicate in tone—and the full intensity of sky blue, for instance, is felt only at the very top of the pic­ture space. Clouds are certainly much more intricate and require special handling. Clouds have substance, although it is very flimsy and changeable, but they have form and shadow as well as mere shape and need to be rigorously kept in place. Always shut your eyes almost to closing before you decide how white a cloud is. You will discover that most clouds are a full tone less than white and have a lot of yellow and warm gray in them, as compared to the full white of any object or shape (such as a white flower or tablecloth) in the front of your picture, for the sky must always take its place as being behind the other things in the picture.

In one sense, the sky is a back-cloth, but do avoid theatrical effect. Handled theatrically it can easily mar an otherwise good picture. This is where you must exercise your aesthetic judgment in the placing of the clouds, so that they harmonize with the composition of the rest of your landscape. Clouds are fleeting and never remain for long in the same shape or color, but you have to select just where you want them and keep them in the right linear and formal relationship to the other ingredients of your whole conception.

figure 12. Sketch for sky study.

They must not "jump out" either, in tone or in shape, from the pattern they make with the other objects in your picture. Examine Figure 12.

EARTH

To paint the earth you need your more solid colors, and you need a firmer handling. The only thing to bear in mind, and it is the reverse of the method of sky painting, is that the shapes, colors, and strokes of the brush must be more emphatic in the front part of your picture. They should become less emphatic and more delicate as you recede to the horizon. The very forefront of your picture has the strongest colors and the boldest strokes of the brush. As more and more atmosphere becomes intermingled with the objects, so they become less definite in color, for gray is mixed in with them, until, in the very far distance, every­thing is blue-gray or purple, with hardly any definite shapes to be seen. With the sky, the horizon is the most subtle in tone and the part overhead the most pro­nounced; with the land the foreground is the strongest in tone, color, and texture and the far distance is the most delicate in color and in treatment. The earth hav­ing a slightly curved'appearance, with the bowl of the sky covering it, you get the two converse effects: the land receding from your feet curving toward infinity, and the sky, from the distant horizon, coming forward again curving over your head. Examine Plate 3 very carefully.

WATER

Water is as easy to paint as the sky. You have to record, chiefly, the atmospheric effect; its appearance has very little to do with form or shape. The only point to bear in mind is that water is flat and does not slant or slope or curve, except where the sea gently curves toward the distant horizon. But (apart from mountain tor­rents and waterfalls) in ponds, rivers, streams, lakes, and all inland waters, the level of the water surface is flat and parallel lines are straight, from left to right across the picture.

Reflections in water are usually slightly in darker tone than the objects reflected. Note carefully where a breeze ruffles the water and makes reflections blurred, or obliterates them entirely. Give an effect of fluidity, as a contrast to the solidity of your earth. Water and sky are more emotional elements and need more feel­ing in their translation into terms of paint. I have in­cluded a Constable chalk sketch for an example (Illustration 4).

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