CHAPTER XXXV: DIFFICULTIES OF BEGINNERS
All painters have difficulty with their pictures, but the trouble with the
beginner is that he has not experience enough to know how to meet it.
The solving of all difficulties is a matter of application of fundamental
principles to them; but it is necessary to know these principles and to
have applied them to simple problems, before one can know how to
apply them to less simple ones.
I have tried to deal fully with these principles rather than to tell how to do any one thing,
and to point out the application whenever it could be done.
There are, however, some things that almost always bother the beginner, and it may be
helpful to speak of them particularly.
Selection of Subject. - One of the chief objections to copying as a method of
beginning study is that while it teaches a good deal about surface work, it gives no
practical training just when it is most needed. The student who has only copied has no
idea how to look for a composition, how to place it on his canvas, or how to translate
into line and color the actual forms which he sees in nature. These things are all done for
him in the picture he is copying, yet these are the very first things he should have
practised in. The making of a picture begins before the drawing and painting begins. You
see something out-doors, or you see a group of people or a single person in an interesting
position. It is one thing to see it; how are you practically to grasp it so as to get it on
canvas? That is quite a different thing. How much shall you take in? How much leave
out? What proportion of the canvas shall the main object or figure take up? All these are
questions which need some experience to answer.
In dealing with figures experience comes somewhat naturally, because you will of
course not undertake more than a head and shoulders, with a plain background, for your
first work. The selecting of subject in this is chiefly the choice of lighting and position of
head, which have been spoken of elsewhere; and the placing of them on the canvas
should be reduced to the making of the head as large as it will come conveniently.
The old rule was that the point of the nose should be about the middle of the canvas,
and in most cases on the ordinary canvas this brings the head in the right place. As you
paint more you will put in more and more the figure, and so progress comes very
naturally.
But in landscape you are more than likely to be almost helpless at first. There is so
much all around you, and so little of saliency, that it is hard to say where to begin and
where to leave off. Practice in still life will help you somewhat, but still things in nature
are seldom arranged with that centralization which makes a subject easy to see. Even the
simplicity which is sometimes obvious is, when you come to paint it, only the more
difficult to handle because of its simplicity. The simplicity which you should look for to
make your selection of a subject easy is not the lack of something to draw, but the