The Painter in oil

Interest. - But the use of this sort of painting is not only its practical use. You need
not feel that it is all drudgery -which is something that most students do not love! You
may make pictures with a much clearer conscience along this line; for the better the
picture, and the more interesting and charming it is, the more successful is your work as
study. You can be as interested in the beauty and the picture of it as you please, and it
will only make you work the better. To see the picture in a group of bottles and books is
to be the more able to see the picture in a tree and sky. An artist’s eye is sensitive to
beauty of color and line and form wherever he sees it. The student’s should be also. No
artist but has found delight in painting still life. No student should think it beneath his
serious study.
Procedure. - Study painting first in still-life compositions. When you set up your
canvas first, and set your palette, let it be in front of a few simple objects grouped
interestingly; or, better, set up a single jar or a book, with a simply arranged background
for color contrast. All the problems of manipulation are there for you to study. No
processes of handling, no manner of color effect, which you cannot use in this study.
Learn here what you will need in other lines of work.
Beginning. - The best way to make a study from still life is to begin with a careful
charcoal drawing on the canvas. You may shade it more or less as you please, but be
most careful about proportions and forms. The shading means the modelling and the
values in black and white; and you can do this either in charcoal as you draw, or it can be
put in with monochrome when you begin with paint. But you must have the drawing
sure and true first; for drawing is position, locality. You must know where a value is to
go before you can justly place it. The value is the how much. You must have the where
before the how much can mean anything in drawing. It would be well to lay in some of
the planes of light and shade, because you feel proportion more naturally and truly so
than with mere outline. The outline encloses the form, but with nothing but outline you
are less apt to feel the reality of the form. The planes of values fill in the outline and give
substance to it. They map it out so that it takes thickness and proportion; it is more real.
And any fault of outline is more quickly seen, because you cannot get your masses of
shade of the right form and proportion if the outline enclosing them is not right.
The Frottée. - Make, then, a careful light-and-shade drawing with charcoal directly
on the canvas, working in the background where it tells against the group, but without
carrying it out to the edges of the canvas.
Be accurate with your modelling and values, and keep the planes simple and well
defined. Draw all characteristic details, but only the most important, nearly as if it were
not to be painted, but were to remain a drawing. Fix this drawing with fixative and an
atomizer.
In beginning with paint go over the drawing with a thin frottée which shall re-enforce
the drawing with color. You may do this with one color, making a monochrome painting
very thin, leaving the canvas bare for the lights. Many of the best painters lay in all
pictures this way. What color is to be used is a matter for consideration. It should be one
so sympathetic to the coloring of the whole picture that if it is left without any other
paint over it in places it will still look all right. Raw umber is a good color, or raw umber
modified with burnt sienna and black. You can make a mixture that seems right. This
establishes your larger values, and gives you something better than a bare canvas, and