ARTISTIC SKILL IN ETCHING and which man can reproduce by forcing it a little. For all else, it comes of itself to the point of such a master's pencil. Note how the artist has made his memoranda of plump cheek and over-plump chin; of the hand carrying the weight of the sleeping head; of the black hood trailing loosely on the shoulder; and then trace, as you easily can, the touches by which those effects have been produced. In each of these conceptions there is sought and found a fresh and original design in black and white. The wide divergence in their character contains a sound lesson in judging works of art. Chapter Twenty PAINTING IN FLAT WITH STENCILLING N EARLY all the painting that has been done in this world is flat; that is to say, without any kind of gradation,1 a matter which is considered in Chapter XXV. A few square feet of canvas and of paper in easel pictures and in drawings, and a few square 1 Gradation the gradual passing of one tint or one hue into another by invisibly slight or untraceable changes. Thus the clear noonday sky gives a gradation from deep blue to a blue so faint as to be undistinguishable from white, which is a gradation of one hue; and a clear evening sky will often give a gradation from blue through white to red or reddish yellow, which is thus a double gradation. The spectrum of the prism is a continuous gradation from deep purple through blue, green, yellow, and orange to pure red, and we may classify three or seven or a dozen different hues there, as the passing from one to another is not traceable. So in an artistic drawing in Chinese Ink (India Ink "), Bistre, or Sepia, the slow change from white paper to the deepest black or brown is obtained by means of a wash, with which the artist mixes continually more and more pure water. The gradations of oil painting are got by continually adding more and more of another pigment to the one used at first. It is for this that the palette is necessary, with its array of little mounds of moist color; the brush goes continually back to these mounds taking more and more white (for instance) to a blue, so making the gradation on the canvas from deeper to paler blue; or to yellow, making the gradation from pure blue to green, and so on till blueness disappears. The awkward verb "to gradate" has been made from gradation, and this verb and its participle gradated" are used by Ruskin in Modern Painters," and by other writers on art. FLAT PAINTING IN ANTIQUITY 2 yards of plastering in mural paintings, indeed, have been, and are annually covered by color applied in gradation by hue1 or by tint or both; but this amount is as nothing to the acres of surface of stone, stucco, plaster, wood, and stretched paper, upon FIG. 148. Egyptian mural painting which color has been laid in the form of flat, uniform, ungraded painting. Thus when, as in Chapter 1 Hue: the characteristic color-quality. Thus the "soft" or "cool" blue of some Chinese silks comes of their being greenish, and their hue is greenish blue, while the hot blue of some European silks is really a deep purple, and its hue is purplish. The hue of Chinese porcelain painting. is generally of a cooler blue than that of Japan. 2 Tint: the darker or lighter, purer or less pure, state of a color. Thus, if we take white lead mixed with vermilion, and lay it on woodwork, and then touch up the red so produced by a lighter red, made by mixing more white with the vermilion, we are using a darker and a lighter tint. V, the painting of surfaces of plank and plaster is found to be quite independent of skill in drawing, it is also found that effective contrast and harmony is obtainable by the mere application of color to surfaces previously settled and fixed. The color, too, is previously settled and fixed; a potful of this red or of that buff is mixed, in advance, and this paint is applied flat, in a skilled, mechanical way. This flat work is often extremely interesting, and of high artistic quality. Thus in Fig. 148, taken from the great work of Prisse d'Avennes, whose drawing of such things, it is admitted, is trustworthy, we have a ceiling of the Eighteenth Dynasty, and of about 1420 B. C. The design is of scrolls which enclose lotos buds and winged scarabs of imaginary form, but all is in flat colors, as follows: dark green, two paler greens, dark red, lighter red, yellow, and white. Fig. 149 gives a panel from a tomb ceiling of the Twentieth Dynasty, and these wild geese are all painted with flat hues, which are even fewer than those of the more conventional design. It will be seen in these plates that there is nothing to prevent the laying of one coat of flat color upon another coat of a kindred or of a totally contrasting hue. The pigment which is superimposed will be often entirely opaque, so that it will not be affected by the under coat; but if the upper coat of paint is partly translucent, the painter easily |
