Page:Drawing for Beginners.djvu/259

 Should you have an uncomfortable feeling that there is something not quite correct in your drawing, that the feet do not come in the right position, that the hand protrudes from the frilled wristband at an angle not quite in harmony with the elbow, take your picture to the window, lay it against a pane of glass, and trace the head, hands, feet, and all parts revealed on the back of the paper. Then return with your drawing to the table and (still with the back of it uppermost) correct your tracings by sketching in the rest of a human body.

Ere you have finished your sketch you will possibly appreciate that you have made the limbs play queer tricks' it is highly probable that you will have made the farther limbs longer than the nearer ones. We have sometimes noticed in sketches of persons sitting with legs crossed that the limbs are inextricably mixed!

Should the paper on which you are drawing be of too thick a substance for this test, take a piece of tracing paper, or a smooth piece of ordinary tissue paper, and on this trace your drawing. Then remove the original drawing, and, laying the tracing paper on a white surface, link up the head, feet, and hands as suggested above.

In all these methods of checking ourselves, it is the fresh view of our drawing that reveals its weaknesses.

When painting, if you feel that your colours are not what they should be, that your tones are dark, or too uneven, that your highest light is not 'in tune' with your middle light&mdash;take a piece of smoked glass and look through this at the reflection of your painting. Gone are the pretty colours, the subtle tints. Your painting will be merely a prosiac black and white affair, and with everything reduced to black and white, to high tones and low tones (light and shade), in all probability the wrong tone will shriek at you.

But if, after all these various methods, you still can see nothing wrong, though a horrid feeling prevails that all cannot be right, if neither advice nor the devices described give a clue&mdash;then, lock up your drawing, put it away for a