o black. You should,
however, try, as I said, to give preciousness to all your colors; and
this especially by never using a grain more than will just do the work,
and giving each hue the highest value by opposition. All fine coloring,
like fine drawing, is delicate; and so delicate that if, at last, you
_see_ the color you are putting on, you are putting on too much. You
ought to feel a change wrought in the general tone, by touches of color
which individually are too pale to be seen; and if there is one atom of
any color in the whole picture which is unnecessary to it, that atom
hurts it.

180. Notice also that nearly all good compound colors are _odd_ colors.
You shall look at a hue in a good painter's work ten minutes before you
know what to call it. You thought it was brown, presently you feel that
it is red; next that there is, somehow, yellow in it; presently
afterwards that there is blue in it. If you try to copy it you will
always find your color too warm or too cold--no color in the box will
seem to have an affinity with it; and yet it will be as pure as if it
were laid at a single touch with a single color.

181. As to the choice and harmony of colors in general, if you cannot
choose and harmonize them by instinct, you will never do it at all. If
you need examples of utterly harsh and horrible color, you may find
plenty given in treatises upon coloring, to illustrate the laws of
harmony; and if you want to color beautifully, color as best pleases
yourself at _quiet times_, not so as to catch the eye, nor look as if it
were clever or difficult to color in that way, but so that the color may
be pleasant to you when you are happy or thoughtful. Look much at the
morning and evening sky, and much at simple flowers--dog-roses,
wood-hyacinths, violets, poppies, thistles, heather, and such like,--as
Nature arranges them in the woods and fields. If ever any scientific
person tells you that two colors are "discordant," make a note of the
two colors, and put them together whenever you can. I have actually
heard people say that blue and green were discordant; the two colors
which Nature seems to intend never to be separated, and never to be
felt, either of them, in its full beauty without the other!--a peacock's
neck, or a blue sky through green leaves, or a blue wave with green
lights through it, being precisely the loveliest things, next to clouds
at sunrise, in this colored world of ours. If you have a good eye for
c