DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.18972#0233
letter in.] ON COLOUR AND COMPOSITION,
205
spoiled. The secret of all good colour in oil, water, or
anything else, lies primarily in that sentence spoken
to me by Mulready: " Know what you have to do."
The process may be a long one, perhaps: you may
have to ground with one colour; to touch it with
fragments of a second; to crumble a third into the
interstices ; a fourth into the interstices of the third ;
to glaze the whole with a fifth; and to reinforce in
points with a sixth : but whether you have one, or
ten, or twenty processes to go through, you must go
straight through them, knowingly and foreseeingly
all the way; and if you get the thing once wrong,
there is no hope for you but in washing or scraping
boldly down to the white gTound, and beginning again.
The drawing in body-colour will tend to teach you
all this, more than any other method, and above all
it will prevent you from falling into the pestilent
habit of sponging to get texture; a trick which has
nearly ruined our modern water-colour school of
art. There are sometimes places in which a skilful
artist will roughen his paper a little to get certain
conditions of dusty colour with more ease than he
205
spoiled. The secret of all good colour in oil, water, or
anything else, lies primarily in that sentence spoken
to me by Mulready: " Know what you have to do."
The process may be a long one, perhaps: you may
have to ground with one colour; to touch it with
fragments of a second; to crumble a third into the
interstices ; a fourth into the interstices of the third ;
to glaze the whole with a fifth; and to reinforce in
points with a sixth : but whether you have one, or
ten, or twenty processes to go through, you must go
straight through them, knowingly and foreseeingly
all the way; and if you get the thing once wrong,
there is no hope for you but in washing or scraping
boldly down to the white gTound, and beginning again.
The drawing in body-colour will tend to teach you
all this, more than any other method, and above all
it will prevent you from falling into the pestilent
habit of sponging to get texture; a trick which has
nearly ruined our modern water-colour school of
art. There are sometimes places in which a skilful
artist will roughen his paper a little to get certain
conditions of dusty colour with more ease than he