CHAPTER XXVI: THE SKETCH
The sketch is the germ of the picture. It contains the idea which may
later become the finished work. In your sketches you gather effects and
suggestions of possibilities, of all kinds. You do not work long over a
sketch, nor do you work perfunctorily. You do no make it because you
ought to, but because you see something in nature which charms you; or
because you have found an idea you wish to make a note.
Understand thoroughly the use and meaning of sketches, and you will get more good
from the making of them. For your sketching is an important matter to your painting.
You do not learn how to paint by sketching; but you can learn a great many things, and
some of them you can learn no other way. A sketch is not a picture; neither is it a study.
Each of these things has its special purpose and function, in its proper character.
A sketch is always a note of an idea - an idea seen or conceived. Everything is
sacrificed in the sketch to the noting of that idea. One idea only, in one sketch; more
ideas, more sketches.
There are two kinds of sketches: those made from nature to seize an effect of some
sort: and those made to work out or express tersely some composition or scheme of color
which you have in your mind. Both are of great use to the student as well as essential to
the work of the artist.
The first conception of a picture is always embodied in the form of a sketch, and the
artist will make as many sketches as he thinks of changes in his original idea. It is in this
form that he works out his picture problem. He is troubled here by nothing but the one
thing he has in mind at this time. It may be arrangement of line or of mass. He changes
and rearranges it as he pleases, not troubling himself in the least with exactness of
drawing, of modeling, of color, nor of anything but that one of composition. It may be a
scheme of color, and here again the spots of pigment only vaguely resemble the things
they will later represent: now they are only composition of color to the painter, and
everything bends to that. When this has been decided on, has been successfully worked
out, then it is time enough to think of other things.
And think of other things he does, before he makes his picture; but not in this sketch;
in another sketch or other sketches, each with its own problem, or in studies which will
furnish more material to be used later; or in the picture itself, where the problem is the
unity of the various ideas within the great whole in the completed painting.
It is the sketch on which the picture rests for its singleness of purpose. No picture but
begins in this way, whether it is afterwards built up on the same canvas or not. The
sketch points the way. But all the preliminary sketches of a painting are not problems of
composition or color; are not conceptions of the brain. There are suggestions received
from nature which the painter perceives rather than conceives. Possibilities show
themselves in these, but it is in the sketch that they first become tangible and stable.