This form of drawing you will probably find more difficult at first.  For the reason already explained it seems natural to observe objects as made up of outlines, not masses.  The frame with cottons across it should be used to flatten the appearance, as in making outline drawings.  And besides this a black glass should be used.  This can easily be made by getting a small piece of glass—­a photographic negative will do—­and sticking some black paper on the back; turning it over the front to keep the raw edges of the glass from cutting the fingers.  Or the glass can be painted on the back with black paint.  Standing with your back to the object and your painting, hold this glass close in front of one of your eyes (the other being closed), so that you can see both your painting and the object.  Seeing the tones thus reduced and simplified, you will be enabled more easily to correct your work.

I should like to emphasise the importance of the setting-out work necessary for brush-drawing.  While it is not necessary to put expressive work into this preparatory work, the utmost care should be taken to ensure its accuracy as far as it goes.  It is a great nuisance if, after you have put up some of your fair structure, you find the foundations are in the wrong place and the whole thing has to be torn down and shifted.  It is of the utmost necessity to have the proportions and the main masses settled at this early stage, and every device of blocking out with square lines and measuring with your knitting-needle, &c., should be adopted to ensure the accuracy of these large proportions.  The variations and emphases that feeling may dictate can be done in the painting stage.  This initial stage is not really a drawing at all, but a species of mapping out, and as such it should be regarded.  The only excuse for making the elaborate preparatory drawings on canvas students sometimes do, is that it enables them to learn the subject, so that when they come to paint it, they already know something about it.  But the danger of making these preparatory drawings interesting is that the student fears to cover them up and lose an outline so carefully and lovingly wrought; and this always results in a poor painting.  When you take up a brush to express yourself, it must be with no fear of hurting a careful drawing.  Your drawing is going to be done with the brush, and only the general setting out of the masses will be of any use to you in the work of this initial stage.  Never paint with the poor spirit of the student who fears to lose his drawing, or you will never do any fine things in painting.  Drawing (expressing form) is the thing you should be doing all the time.  And in art, “he that would save his work must often lose it,” if you will excuse the paraphrase of a profound saying which, like most profound sayings, is applicable to many things in life besides what it originally referred to.  It is often necessary when a painting is #nearly# right to destroy the whole thing in order to accomplish the apparently little that still divides it from what you conceive it should be.  It is like a man rushing a hill that is just beyond the power of his motor-car to climb, he must take a long run at it.  And if the first attempt lands him nearly up at the top but not #quite#, he has to go back and take the long run all over again, to give him the impetus that shall carry him right through.