[Sidenote:  Paper.]

The varieties of paper on the market at the service of the artist are innumerable, and nothing need be said here except that the texture of your paper will have a considerable influence on your drawing.  But try every sort of paper so as to find what suits the particular things you want to express.  I make a point of buying every new paper I see, and a new paper is often a stimulant to some new quality in drawing.  Avoid the wood-pulp papers, as they turn dark after a time.  Linen rag is the only safe substance for good papers, and artists now have in the O.W. papers a large series that they can rely on being made of linen only.

It is sometimes advisable, when you are not drawing a subject that demands a clear hard line, but where more sympathetic qualities are wanted, to have a wad of several sheets of paper under the one you are working on, pinned on the drawing-board.  This gives you a more sympathetic surface to work upon and improves the quality of your work.  In redrawing a study with which you are not quite satisfied, it is a good plan to use a thin paper, pinning it over the first study so that it can be seen through.  One can by this means start as it were from the point where one left off.  Good papers of this description are now on the market.  I fancy they are called “bank-note” papers.

XXI

CONCLUSION

Mechanical invention, mechanical knowledge, and even a mechanical theory of the universe, have so influenced the average modern mind, that it has been thought necessary in the foregoing pages to speak out strongly against the idea of a mechanical standard of accuracy in artistic drawing.  If there were such a standard, the photographic camera would serve our purpose well enough.  And, considering how largely this idea is held, one need not be surprised that some painters use the camera; indeed, the wonder is that they do not use it more, as it gives in some perfection the mechanical accuracy which is all they seem to aim at in their work.  There may be times when the camera can be of use to artists, but only to those who are thoroughly competent to do without it—­to those who can look, as it were, through the photograph and draw from it with the same freedom and spontaneity with which they would draw from nature, thus avoiding its dead mechanical accuracy, which is a very difficult thing to do.  But the camera is a convenience to be avoided by the student.

Now, although it has been necessary to insist strongly on the difference between phenomena mechanically recorded and the records of a living individual consciousness, I should be very sorry if anything said should lead students to assume that a loose and careless manner of study was in any way advocated.  The training of his eye and hand to the most painstaking accuracy of observation and record must be the student’s aim for many years.  The variations on mechanical accuracy in the work of a fine draughtsman need not be, and seldom are, conscious variations.  Mechanical accuracy is a much easier thing to accomplish than accuracy to the subtle perceptions of the artist.  And he who cannot draw with great precision the ordinary cold aspect of things cannot hope to catch the fleeting aspect of his finer vision.