Ruskin, John: The elements of drawing: in three letters to beginners (London, 1857)

42

THE ELEMENTS OF DRAWING.

[letter i.

degree similarly numbered in the red or the blue
slip. Then, when you are drawing from objects of
a crimson or blue colour, if you can match their
colour by any compartment of the crimson or blue
in your scales, the grey in the compartment of the
grey scale marked with the same number is the
grey which must represent that crimson or blue in
your light and shade drawing.

Next, prepare scales with gamboge, cobalt, and
vermilion. You will find that you cannot darken
these beyond a certain point1; for yellow and scarlet,
so long as they remain yellow and scarlet, cannot ap-
proach to black; we cannot have, properly speaking,
a dark yellow or dark scarlet. Make your scales of
full yellow, blue, and scarlet, half-way down; passing
then gradually to white. Afterwards use lake to
darken the upper half of the vermilion and gam-
boge ; and Prussian blue to darken the cobalt. You
will thus have three more scales, passing from white
nearly to black, through yellow and orange, through

1 The degree of darkness you can reach with the given colour
is always indicated by the colour of the solid cake in the box.