The Painter in oil

is all covered, so that the background effect is there, it is all that is needed as yet.
The most important figures are to be painted, beginning with the heads and hands,
and at the same time painting the parts next to them, the background and drawing close
around them, so that the immediate values shall all be true as far as it has gone.
No small details of painting yet. The whole canvas is carried forward by painting all
over it, no one thing being entirely finished; for the same degree of progress should be
kept up for the whole picture. To finish anyone part long before the rest is done, would
be to run the risk of over-painting that part.
After the heads and other flesh parts, the draperies should be brought up, and the
background and all objects in it painted, to bring the whole picture to the same degree of
completion. This finishes the second painting. It is all done from nature direct, and is
painted solidly as a rule. Even if the first painting has been a frottée this one will have
been solidly painted into that frottée, although the transparent rubbing may have been
left showing, whenever it was true in effect; most probably in the shadows and broader
dark masses of the backgrounds. In the second painting no glazings or scumblings come
in. The canvas is brought forward as far as possible with direct frame brush-work with
body color before these other processes can be used. Glazes and such manipulations
require a solid under-painting, and a comparative completion of the picture for safe
work. These processes are for the modifying of color mainly; you do not draw nor
represent the important and fundamental facts of the picture with them. All these things
are painted first, in the most frank and direct way, and then you can do anything you
want to on a sure basis of well-understood representation. There will be structure
underneath your future processes.
The Third Painting. - The third painting simply goes over the picture in the same
manner as the second, but marking out more carefully the important details and
enforcing the accuracy of features, or strengthening the accents of dark and bringing up
those of the lights. The procedure will, of course, be different, according as the picture
was begun with an ébouch of body color or frottée of transparent color. The third
painting will, in either case, carry the picture as a whole further toward being finished.
Rough and Smooth. - If body color has been used pretty freely in the two first
paintings, the surface of paint will be pretty rough in places by the time it is ready for the
third painting. Whether that roughness is a thing to be got rid of or not is something for
the painter to decide for himself. Among the greatest of painters there have always been
men who painted smoothly and men who painted roughly.
I have considered elsewhere the subject of detail, but the question of detail bears on
that of the roughness of the painting; for minute detail is not possible with much
roughness of surface; the fineness of the stroke which secures the detail is lost in the
corrugations of the heavier brush-strokes. The effect of color, and especially luminosity,
has much to do with the way paint is put on also, and all these things are to be
considered. As a rule, it might be well to look upon either extreme as something not of
importance in itself. The mere quality of smoothness on the canvas is of no consequence
upon the getting of certain other qualities which are justly to be considered worth
striving for, then these qualities will be seen on the canvas, and will be all right. The
painter will do well to look on them as something incidental merely to the picture. If he
will simply work quite frankly, intent on the expression of what is true and vital to his
picture, the question of the surface quality of his canvas will not bother him beyond the
effect that it has upon his attaining of that expression.