r is that he has not experience enough to know how to meet
it. The solving of all difficulties is a matter of application of
fundamental principles to them; but it is necessary to know these
principles, and to have applied them to simple problems, before one
can know how to apply them to less simple ones.

I have tried to deal fully with these principles rather than to tell
how to do any one thing, and to point out the application whenever it
could be done.

There are, however, some things that almost always bother the
beginner, and it may be helpful to speak of them particularly.

=Selection of Subject.=--One of the chief objections to copying as a
method of beginning study is that while it teaches a good deal about
surface-work, it gives no practical training just when it is most
needed. The student who has only copied has no idea how to look for a
composition, how to place it on his canvas, or how to translate into
line and color the actual forms which he sees in nature. These things
are all done for him in the picture he is copying, yet these are the
very first things he should have practised in. The making of a picture
begins before the drawing and painting begins. You see something
out-doors, or you see a group of people or a single person in an
interesting position. It is one thing to see it; how are you
practically to grasp it so as to get it on canvas? That is quite a
different thing. How much shall you take in? How much leave out? What
proportion of the canvas shall the main object or figure take up? All
these are questions which need some experience to answer.

In dealing with figures experience comes somewhat naturally, because
you will of course not undertake more than a head and shoulders, with
a plain background, for your first work. The selecting of subject in
this is chiefly the choice of lighting and position of head, which
have been spoken of elsewhere; and the placing of them on the canvas
should be reduced to the making of the head as large as it will come
conveniently. The old rule was that the point of the nose should be
about the middle of the canvas, and in most cases on the ordinary
canvas this brings the head in the right place. As you paint more you
will put in more and more of the figure, and so progress comes very
naturally.

But in landscape you are more than likely to be almost helpless at
first. There is so much all around you, and so little saliency, that
it is hard to say where t