ittle more to one
side or the other, higher or lower, as you find needed. When you have
done this to your satisfaction, you have done the first important
thing.

[Illustration: =Landscape Photo. No. 2.=]

=Still Life, etc.=--If your subject be still life, flowers, or an
animal or other figure, go about it in the same way. Look at it well.
Try to get an idea of its general shape, and block that out with a few
lines. You will almost always find a horizontal line which by cutting
across the mass will help you to decide where the mass will best come.
First, the mass must be about the right size, and then it must balance
well on the canvas. Any of the things suggested as helping about
drawing and values will of course help you here. The reducing-glass
will help you to get the size and position of things. The card with a
square hole in it will do the same. Even a sort of little frame made
with the fingers and thumbs of your two hands will cut off the
surrounding objects, and help you see your group as a whole with other
things out of the way.

=Walk About.=--A change of position of a very few feet sometimes makes
a great difference in the looks of a subject. The first view of it is
not always the best. Walk around a little; look at it from one point
and from another. Take your time. Better begin a little later than
stop because you don't like it and feel discouraged. Time taken to
consider well beforehand is never lost. "Well begun is half done."

=Relief.=--In beginning a thing you want to have the first few
minutes' work to do the most possible towards giving you something to
judge by. You want from the very first to get something recognizable.
Then every subsequent touch, having reference to that, will be so much
the more sure and effective. Look, then, first for what will count
most.

=What to look for.=--Whether you lay your work out first with
black-and-white or with paint, look to see where the greatest contrast
is. Where is there a strong light against dark and a strong dark
against light? Not the little accents, but that which marks the
contact of two great planes. Find this first, and represent it as soon
as you have got the main values, in this way the whole thing will tell
as an actuality. It will not yet carry much expression, but it will
look like a _fact_, and it will have established certain relations
from which you can work forward.

=Colors.=--It ought to go without saying that the colors as they com