For rubbed work white pastel is better than the ordinary white chalk sold for drawing, as it is not so hard.  A drawing done in this method with white pastel and red chalk is reproduced on page 46 [Transcribers Note:  Plate IV], and one with the hard white chalk, on page 260 [Transcribers Note:  Plate LIV].

This is the method commonly used for making studies of drapery, the extreme rapidity with which the position of the lights and shadows can be expressed being of great importance when so unstable a subject as an arrangement of drapery is being drawn.

[Sidenote:  Lithography.]

Lithography as a means of artistic reproduction has suffered much in public esteem by being put to all manner of inartistic trade uses.  It is really one of the most wonderful means of reproducing an artist’s actual work, the result being, in most cases, so identical with the original that, seen together, if the original drawing has been done on paper, it is almost impossible to distinguish any difference.  And of course, as in etching, it is the prints that are really the originals.  The initial work is only done as a means of producing these.

A drawing is made on a lithographic stone, that is, a piece of limestone that has been prepared with an almost perfectly smooth surface.  The chalk used is a special kind of a greasy nature, and is made in several degrees of hardness and softness.  No rubbing out is possible, but lines can be scratched out with a knife, or parts made lighter by white lines being drawn by a knife over them.  A great range of freedom and variety is possible in these initial drawings on stone.  The chalk can be rubbed up with a little water, like a cake of water-colour, and applied with a brush.  And every variety of tone can be made with the side of the chalk.

Some care should be taken not to let the warm finger touch the stone, or it may make a greasy mark that will print.

When this initial drawing is done to the artist’s satisfaction, the most usual method is to treat the stone with a solution of gum-arabic and a little nitric acid.  After this is dry, the gum is washed off as far as may be with water; some of the gum is left in the porous stone, but it is rejected where the greasy lines and tones of the drawing come.  Prints may now be obtained by rolling up the stone with an inked roller.  The ink is composed of a varnish of boiled linseed oil and any of the lithographic colours to be commercially obtained.

The ink does not take on the damp gummed stone, but only where the lithographic chalk has made a greasy mark, so that a perfect facsimile of the drawing on stone is obtained, when a sheet of paper is placed on the stone and the whole put through the press.

The medium deserves to be much more popular with draughtsmen than it is, as no more perfect means of reproduction could be devised.