Before beginning a drawing, it is not a bad idea to study carefully the work of some master draughtsman whom the subject to be drawn may suggest.  If you do this carefully and thoughtfully, and take in a full enjoyment, your eye will unconsciously be led to see in nature some of the qualities of the master’s work.  And you will see the subject to be drawn as a much finer thing than would have been the case had you come to it with your eye unprepared in any way.  Reproductions are now so good and cheap that the best drawings in the world can be had for a few pence, and every student should begin collecting reproductions of the things that interest him.

This is not the place to discuss questions of health, but perhaps it will not be thought grandmotherly to mention the extreme importance of nervous vitality in a fine draughtsman, and how his life should be ordered on such healthy lines that he has at his command the maximum instead of the minimum of this faculty.  After a certain point, it is a question of vitality how far an artist is likely to go in art.  Given two men of equal ability, the one leading a careless life and the other a healthy one, as far as a healthy one is possible to such a supersensitive creature as an artist, there can be no doubt as to the result.  It is because there is still a lingering idea in the minds of many that an artist must lead a dissipated life or he is not really an artist, that one feels it necessary to mention the subject.  This idea has evidently arisen from the inability of the average person to associate an unconventional mode of life with anything but riotous dissipation.  A conventional life is not the only wholesome form of existence, and is certainly a most unwholesome and deadening form to the artist; and neither is a dissipated life the only unconventional one open to him.  It is as well that the young student should know this, and be led early to take great care of that most valuable of studio properties, vigorous health.

XX

MATERIALS

The materials in which the artist works are of the greatest importance in determining what qualities in the infinite complexity of nature he selects for expression.  And the good draughtsman will find out the particular ones that belong to whatever medium he selects for his drawing, and be careful never to attempt more than it is capable of doing.  Every material he works with possesses certain vital qualities peculiar to itself, and it is his business to find out what these are and use them to the advantage of his drawing.  When one is working with, say, pen and ink, the necessity for selecting only certain things is obvious enough.  But when a medium with the vast capacity of oil paint is being used, the principle of its governing the nature of the work is more often lost sight of.  So near can oil paint approach an actual illusion of natural appearances, that much