The Painter in oil

The use of a lay figure will help you somewhat if you can get one which is true in
proportion. It will not help you much in the finer modeling, but it will at least insure
your structural lines being in the right place, and that is as much as you can hope for
without the special study of the nude.
A lay figure is expensive, costing about three hundred dollars in this country. You will
hardly be apt to aspire to a full-sized one, as only professional painters can afford to pay
so much for accessories. But small wooden ones are within the means of most people,
and will be found useful for the purpose I have mentioned, and one should be obtained.
When you have assured yourself, as far as you can by its use with and without special
draperies, of the right action of your drawing, you must do your painting from the
draped model.
The Model. - Never paint without nature before you. If you paint the figure, never
paint without the model. For the sake of the study of it, it goes without saying that you
can learn to paint the figure only by studying from the figure. But beyond that, for the
sake of your picture, you can have no hope of doing good work without working from the
actual object represented. The greatest masters have never done pictures “out of their
heads.” The compositions and esthetic qualities came from their heads it is true, but they
never worked these things out on canvas without the aid of nature. And the greater the
master, the more humble was he in his dependence on nature for the truth of his facts.
Much more, then, the student needs to keep himself rigidly to the guidance of nature;
and this he can only do by the constant use of the model.
One Figure or Many. - Whether you have one or more figures, the problem may be
kept the same. The canvas must balance in mass and line and in color. When you decide
to make a picture with several figures, study the composition first as if they were not
figures, but groups of masses and line. Get the whole to balance and compose, then
decide your color composition. Simplify rather than make complex. The more you have
of number, the more you should consider them as parts of a whole. Keep the idea of
grouping; combine the figures, rather than divide them. Have every figure in some
logical relation to its group, and then the group in relation to the other parts. Don’t
string them out or spot them about. Study the spaces between as well as the spaces they
occupy. And don’t fill up these spaces with background objects. That will not bind the
group together, but will separate it. Fill the spaces with air and with values-even more
important!
All this arranged, paint each group and each figure as if it were one thing instead of
many. As you treat the head, the body, the dress, and the chair as all parts of a whole in a
single sitting figure, so treat the various heads, bodies, dresses, etc., in a group as parts
of a whole, by studying always the relations of each to each. And then study to keep the
different groups as parts of whole canvas in the same way.
Simplicity of Subject. - But do not be too ambitious in your attempts. Keep your
subjects simple. Don’t be in a hurry to paint many figures. Paint one figure well before
you try several.
You will find plenty of scope for your knowledge and skill in single figures. Practice
with sketches and compositions, if you will, in grouping several figures, and try to
manage them so that the whole shall be simple in mass and effect; but do not attempt, as
a student, without experience and skill in the painting of one figure, to paint pictures
containing several. By the time you can really paint a single figure well, you can dispense
with a manual of painting, and branch out as ambitiously as you please.