The Painter in oil

On the other hand, if it is too small, its very size makes it significant.
If it is a landscape, decide first to proportions of land and sky, — where your horizon
line will come. Then, having drawn that line, make three or four lines which will give the
mass of the main affect the object as a barn, the tree, slope of hill, or whatever it be, get
merely its simplest suggestion of outline. These two things will show you, on considering
their relation to each other and to the rest of the canvas, about what its emphasis will be.
If it isn’t right, rub it out and do it again, a little larger or smaller, a little more to one
side or the other, higher or lower, as you fine needed. Whenever you have done this to
your satisfaction, you have done the first important thing.
Still Life, etc. - If your subject be still life, flowers, or an animal or other figure, go
about it in the same way. Look at it well. Try to get an idea of its general shape, and
block that out with a few lines. You will almost always find a horizontal line which by
cutting across the mass will help you to decide where the mass will best come. First, the
mass must be about the right size, and then it must balance well on the canvas. Any of
the things suggested as helping about drawing and values will of course help our there.
The reducing-glass will help you get the size and position of things. The card with a
square hole in it will do the same. Even a sort of little frame made with the fingers and
thumbs of your two hands will cut off the surrounding objects, and help you see your
group as a whole with other things out of the way.
Walk About. - A change a position of a very few feet sometimes makes a great
difference in the looks of a subject. The first view of it is not always the best. Walk
around a little; look at it from one point and from another. Take your time. Better begin
a little later than stop because you don’t like it and fill discouraged. Time taken to
consider well beforehand is never lost. “Well begun is half done.”
Relief. - In beginning of thing you want to have the first few minutes work to do the
most possible toward giving you something to judge by. You want from the very first to
get something recognizable. Then every subsequent touch, having reference to that, will
be so much the more sure and effective. Look, then, first for what will count most.
What to look for. - Whether you lay your work out first with black-and-white or
with paint, look to see where the greatest contrast is. Where is there a strong light
against darken and a strong dark against light? Not the little accents, but that which
marks the contact of two great planes. Find this first, and represent it so on as you have
got the main values, in this way the whole thing will tell as an actuality. It will not yet
carry much expression, but it will look like a fact, and it will have established certain
relations from which you can work forward.
Colors. - It ought to go without saying that the colors as they come from the tube are
not right for any color you see in nature however you think they look. But beginners are
very apt to think that if they cannot get the color they want, they can get it in another
kind of tube. This is a mistake. The tubes of color that are actually necessary for almost
every possible tint or combination in nature are very few. But they must be used to
advantage.
Now and then one finds his palette lacking, and must add to it; but after one has
experimented a while he settles down to some eight or ten colors which will do almost
everything, and two or three more that will do what remains. When you work out-of-
doors you may find that more variety will help you and gain time for you; that several