up of petals.

Yet you cannot paint the _petals_ either, else you lose the _flower_.
You must paint the _quality_ of the petal, and the _character_ of the
flower.

All these things make the mere perception of facts most difficult, and
it must be done with full knowledge that in an hour it will be
something else, and you can never get it back to its original form
again. Yet you cannot paint a bunch of flowers in an hour. What will
you do?

=Mass and Value.=--There is something besides the flower and the
petal; there is the _mass_. The mass is _one thing_, and it is
surrounded with air, and air goes through the interstices of it. You
must make this visible. The difference in value in flowers is
something "infinitely little," as a great flower painter said to me
once. Yet the difference is there. The bunch has its nearer and its
farther sides, and the way the light falls on it is the most obvious
expression of it.

When you begin a group of flowers, get the _whole_ first. Make up your
mind that you cannot complete your work from the flower you have in
front of you, and that you must constantly change your models. Do not
paint the little things, the personal things first then. Paint what is
common to all the flowers in the group first. Paint the mass and the
rotundity of it, and express most vaguely the _forms_ of the accents,
and of the darks which fall between the flowers, but get their
values. For you will have to change these, and you should have nothing
there which will influence you to shirk. In this way only can you get
the larger things without hampering your future work by what may be
wrong.

[Illustration: =Sweet Peas.=]

Get the large values, and as little as possible of the expression of
the individual flowers; then as the flowers fade and change,
substitute one or two fresh ones at a time, in this or that part of
the partially wilted group, using the same kind of flower as that
which was in that place before; then work more closely from these new
flowers, letting the whole bunch preserve for you the mass and general
relation. As you work, the bunch will be gradually changing and
constantly renewed from part to part, and you can work slowly from
general to particular. Finally, from new flowers, put in those more
individual touches which give the personal flowers.

This is the only way you can work a long time, and it is not easy. But
it should not discourage you. Nothing takes the place of the flower