nce with it, it will impose its
own scale on all other objects. You can make a figure impress the
observer as being life size, although it may really be only a few
inches long. A house or castle coming into the picture may be made to
give its scale to the surroundings, and make them seem small instead
of itself seeming merely an object in a picture. This will be due to
the _placing_ of it on the canvas, largely, and more in this than in
anything else. The manner of painting will also lend importantly to
it; for an object to appear big must not be drawn nor painted in a
little manner.

The placing of objects of a known size near, to give scale, is a
useless expedient in such a case. At times it may be successful, often
of use; but if the scale of the main object is false, the other object
of known size, instead of giving size to the main one, as it is
intended to do, will be itself dwarfed by it.

=Placing.=--This matter of placing is one which you should constantly
practise. Make it a regular study when you are sketching from nature.
Try to concentrate in your sketches so as to help your study of
composition. In making a sketch, look for one main effect, and often
have that effect the importance of some object, studying to give it
_scale_ by the placing and the treatment of it, and its relation to
the things surrounding it in nature and on the canvas. In this way you
will be studying composition in a most practical way.

=Still Life.=--For practical study of composition, the most useful
materials you can have are to be found in still life. Nowhere can you
have so great freedom of arrangement in the concrete. You can take as
many actual objects as you please, and place them in all sorts of
relations to each other, studying their effect as to grouping; and so
study most tangibly the principles as well as the practice of bringing
together line and mass and color as elements, through the means of
actual objects. This you should constantly do, till composition is no
more an abstract thing, but a practical study in which you may work
out freely and visibly intellectual aesthetic ideas almost
unconsciously, and train your eye to see instinctively the
possibilities of all sorts of compositions, and to correct the
falsities of accidental combinations.

=Don't Attempt too much.=--Don't be too ambitious. Begin with simple
arrangements, and add to them, studying the structure of each new
combination and grouping. When you are