Hold your charcoal in your hand freely, so that your thumb can slip along it and mark
off parts of the object when you sight at them across the coal. Measure horizontal and
vertical proportions into themselves and into each other. Height and breadth are checks
to each other. If the height is a certain proportion of the breadth, then the smaller
proportions of height must have equivalent proportions to each other as well as to
breadth. Measure these and you are sure of being right.
Steps. - Divide your drawing into steps or stages of work. You will find a helpful thing
in studying. You will do it quite naturally later. Do it deliberately at first, as a matter of
training.
First step. - Measure the extreme height and breadth of the whole group or object of
your drawing, with accuracy, and mark each extreme.
Second step. - Outline the great mass of it with the simplest lines possible. Give the
general shape of the whole. This block it in.
Third step. - Measure each of the objects in the group, or the parts most prominent, if
it be a single object. Measure its height and breadth, both in its own proportion and in
proportion to the dimensions of the other parts and of the whole. Enclose it in straight
lines as you did with the whole mass.
Fourth step. - Find the more important of the lesser proportions in each object, and
block them out also. This should map out your drawing exactly and with some
completeness.
Fifth step. - Lay in simple flat tones to fill in these outlines, and keep the relations of
light and dark very carefully as you do so.
Sixth step. - This should leave your paper with a few large masses of dark and light,
which can now be cut into again with the next smaller masses, giving more refinement to
the whole. This also should so break up the edges as to get rid of any feeling of
squareness or edginess.
Seventh step. - Put in such accents of dark, or take out such of light, as will give
necessary character and force to the drawing.
I do not say that this method produces the most finished drawing; but it is a most
excellent way to study drawing, and, more or less modified, is practically the basis of all
methods. In practised hands it allows of any amount of exactness or freedom of
execution. I have seen most beautiful work done in this way.
Home Study. - It is not necessary to have a teacher in order to draw well; but it is
necessary to find out what are the essentials of good drawing, and to work definitely and
acquire them.
Good drawing is a combination of exactness and freedom; and the exactness must come
first. The structure of the thing must be shown without unnecessary detail. You should
always look at any really good drawing you can come at, and try to see what there may
be in it of helpful suggestion to you.
Study the Masters. - Get photographs of drawings by the masters of drawing, and
study them. See how they searches their model for form and character. Do not make so
much of the actual stroke as the manner which is made to express and lend itself to the
meaning.