Taking raw umber and white (oil paint), mix up a tone that you think equal to the half tones of the cast before you.  Extreme care should be taken in matching this tone.  Now scumble this with a big brush equally over the whole canvas (or whatever you are making your study on).  Don’t use much medium, but if it is too stiff to go on thinly enough, put a little oil with it, but no turpentine.  By scumbling is meant rubbing the colour into the canvas, working the brush from side to side rapidly, and laying just the #thinnest solid tone# that will cover the surface.  If this is properly done, and your drawing was well fixed, you will just be able to see it through the paint.  Now mix up a tone equal to the highest lights on the cast, and map out simply the shapes of the light masses on your study, leaving the scumbled tone for the half tones.  Note carefully where the light masses come sharply against the half tones and where they merge softly into them.

You will find that the scumbled tone of your ground will mix with the tone of the lights with which you are painting, and darken it somewhat.  This will enable you to get the amount of variety you want in the tone of the lights.  The thicker you paint the lighter will be the tone, while the thinner paint will be more affected by the original half tone, and will consequently be darker.  When this is done, mix up a tone equal to the darkest shadow, and proceed to map out the shadows in the same way as you did the lights; noting carefully where they come sharply against the half tone and where they are lost.  In the case of the shadows the thicker you paint the darker will be the tone; and the thinner, the lighter.

When the lights and shadows have been mapped out, if this has been done with any accuracy, your work should be well advanced.  And it now remains to correct and refine it here and there, as you feel it wants it.  Place your work alongside the cast, and walk back to correct it.  Faults that are not apparent when close, are easily seen at a little distance.

I don’t suggest that this is the right or only way of painting, but I do suggest that exercises of this description will teach the student many of the rudimentary essentials of painting, such elementary things as how to lay a tone, how to manage a brush, how to resolve appearances into a simple structure of tones, and how to manipulate your paint so as to express the desired shape.  This elementary paint drawing is, as far as I know, never given as an exercise, the study of drawing at present being confined to paper and charcoal or chalk mediums.  Drawing in charcoal is the nearest thing to this “paint drawing,” it being a sort of mixed method, half line and half mass drawing.  But although allied to painting, it is a very different thing from expressing form with paint, and no substitute for some elementary exercise with the brush.  The use of charcoal to the neglect of line drawing often gets the student into a sloppy manner of work, and is not so good a training to the eye and hand in clear, definite statement.  Its popularity is no doubt due to the fact that you can get much effect with little knowledge.  Although this painting into a middle tone is not by any means the only method of painting, I do feel that it is the best method for studying form expression with the brush.