rom a chair to a man. The principles of drawing do not change
with the character of anatomy. The animal may be less amiable a poser,
but you must make allowance for that.

When you have got a knowledge of the form, and the character of color
and surface, take the animal out-doors, get some one to help hold him,
and apply the same principles that would govern your study of a rock
or a tree in the open air.

As for fur, and all that sort of thing, treat it as you would any
other texture-problem in still life.

CHAPTER XXXIV

PROCEDURE IN A PICTURE

Some pictures, particularly those begun and finished in the open air,
may be frankly commenced immediately on the canvas from nature as she
is before the painter, and without any special processes or methods of
procedure carried on to completion. But many pictures are of a sort
which renders this manner of work unwise or impossible. There may be
too many figures involved. The composition, the drawing, or other
arrangement may be too complicated for it, and then the painter has to
have some methodical and systematic way of bringing his picture into
existence. He must take preliminary measures to ensure his work coming
out as he intends, and must proceed in an orderly and regular manner
in accordance with the planning of the work. It is in this sort of
thing that he finds sketches and studies essential to the painting of
the picture as distinguished from their more common use as training
for him, or accumulation of general facts.

=Preliminaries.=--There must be made numbers of sketches, first of the
slightest and merely suggestive, and then of a more complete, kind,
to develop the general idea of composition from the first and perhaps
crude conception of the picture. All the great painters have left
examples of work in these various stages. It is a part of the training
of every student in art schools to make these composition sketches,
and to develop them more or less fully in larger work. In the French
schools there are monthly _concours_, when men compete for prizes with
work, and their success is influenced by a previous _concour_ of these
composition sketches.

This preliminary sketch in its completed stage gives the number and
position and movement of the figures and accessories, with the
arrangement of light and shade and color. There is no attempt to give
anything more than the most general kind of drawin