et acquainted with any ordinary skillful water-color
painter, and prevail on him to show you how to lay on tints with a
brush, by all means do so; not that you are yet, nor for a long while
yet, to begin to color, but because the brush is often more convenient
than the pencil for laying on masses or tints of shade, and the sooner
you know how to manage it as an instrument the better. If, however, you
have no opportunity of seeing how water-color is laid on by a workman of
any kind, the following directions will help you:--

EXERCISE VII.

24. Get a shilling cake of Prussian blue. Dip the end of it in water so
as to take up a drop, and rub it in a white saucer till you cannot rub
much more, and the color gets dark, thick, and oily-looking. Put two
teaspoonfuls of water to the color you have rubbed down, and mix it well
up with a camel's-hair brush about three quarters of an inch long.

25. Then take a piece of smooth, but not glossy, Bristol board or
pasteboard; divide it, with your pencil and rule, into squares as large
as those of the very largest chess-board: they need not be perfect
squares, only as nearly so as you can quickly guess. Rest the pasteboard
on something sloping as much as an ordinary desk; then, dipping your
brush into the color you have mixed, and taking up as much of the liquid
as it will carry, begin at the top of one of the squares, and lay a pond
or runlet of color along the top edge. Lead this pond of color
gradually downwards, not faster at one place than another, but as if you
were adding a row of bricks to a building, all along (only building down
instead of up), dipping the brush frequently so as to keep the color as
full in that, and in as great quantity on the paper, as you can, so only
that it does not run down anywhere in a little stream. But if it should,
never mind; go on quietly with your square till you have covered it all
in. When you get to the bottom, the color will lodge there in a great
wave. Have ready a piece of blotting-paper; dry your brush on it, and
with the dry brush take up the superfluous color as you would with a
sponge, till it all looks even.

26. In leading the color down, you will find your brush continually go
over the edge of the square, or leave little gaps within it. Do not
endeavor to retouch these, nor take much care about them; the great
thing is to get the color to lie smoothly where it reaches, not in
alternate blots and pale patches; try, therefore, to