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

LETTER I.]

ON FIRST PRACTICE.

107

sometimes necessary to draw pure outlines, as an
incipient arrangement of a composition, to be filled
up afterwards with colour, or to be pricked through
and used as patterns or tracings; but if, with no
such ultimate object, making the drawing wholly
for its own sake, and meaning it to remain in
the state he leaves it, an artist restricts himself to
outline, he is a bad draughtsman, and his work is
bad. There is no exception to this law. A good
artist habitually sees masses, not edges, and can in
every case make his drawing more expressive (with
any given quantity of work) by rapid shade than by
contours; so that all good work whatever is more or
less touched with shade, and more or less interrupted
as outline.

Hence, the published works of Eetsch, and all the
English imitations of them, and all outline en-
gravings from pictures, are bad work, and only serve
to corrupt the public taste. And of such outlines,
the worst are those which are darkened in some part
of their course by way of expressing the dark side,.