Page:Drawing for Beginners.djvu/142

 CHAPTER X

Colour, and how to Find it

OLOUR is the most deceptive thing under the sun.

No two people see colour in exactly the same way, no two people reproduce&mdash;or paint&mdash;colour with exactly the same blending of tints.

If a colour-group is placed before several young artists with paint-boxes in their hands, we shall not find&mdash;providing, of course, that they are not copying each other&mdash;the artists choosing the same tints wherewith to paint the same objects. In all probability every painting would be quite different. Which proves that colour appeals to all of us in varied degrees.

Painting is not a mere matching of tints, or placing one tint against another tint.

We might begin our picture with a conscientious desire to match every colour exactly and yet produce something horribly wrong. Because we began with a wrong idea in our head. We started from an entirely false basis.

We must not begin by asking ourselves, "Is that an orange, blue, or green tint?" but, "What is the colour that pervades and envelops the whole?"

Have you ever walked in the meadows or down a street in a city and remarked to yourself how different everything looked when last you were there?

Perhaps it was then a brilliantly sunny day, and on the day on which you made the remark the same street was dripping and shining from recent rain-storms. It would indeed be different. Then the sun filled every chink and shadow with golden warmth. It played on the fronts of the houses, it sparkled on the window-frames, it picked out the red flush of the bricks, it spied the orange peel in the gutter,