s
your work as study. You can be as interested in the beauty and the
picture of it as you please, and it will only make you work the
better. To see the picture in a group of bottles and books is to be
the more able to see the picture in a tree and sky. An artist's eye is
sensitive to beauty of color and line and form wherever he sees it.
The student's should be also. No artist but has found delight in
painting still life. No student should think it beneath his serious
study.

=Procedure.=--Study painting first in still-life compositions. When
you set up your canvas first, and set your palette, let it be in front
of a few simple objects grouped interestingly; or, better, set up a
single jar or a book, with a simply arranged background for color
contrast. All the problems of manipulation are there for you to study.
No processes of handling, no manner of color effect, which you cannot
use in this study.

Learn here what you will need in other lines of work.

=Beginning.=--The best way to make a study from still life is to begin
with a careful charcoal drawing on the canvas. You may shade it more
or less as you please, but be most careful about proportions and
forms. The shading means the modelling and the values in black and
white; and you can do this either in charcoal as you draw, or it can
be put in with monochrome when you begin with paint. But you must have
the drawing sure and true first; for drawing is position, locality.
You must know _where_ a value is to go before you can justly place it.
The value is the _how much_. You must have the _where_ before the _how
much_ can mean anything in drawing. It would be well to lay in some of
the planes of light and shade, because you feel proportion more
naturally and truly so than with mere outline. The outline encloses
the form, but with nothing but outline you are less apt to feel the
reality of the form. The planes of values fill in the outline and give
substance to it. They map it out so that it takes thickness and
proportion; it is more real. And any fault of outline is more quickly
seen, because you cannot get your masses of shade of the right form
and proportion if the outline enclosing them is not right.

=The Frottee.=--Make, then, a careful light-and-shade drawing with
charcoal directly on the canvas, working in the background where it
tells against the group, but without carrying it out to the edges of
the canvas.

Be accurate with your modelling and values,