he brush as delicately as if you were drawing with pencil,
and dotting and cross-hatching as lightly as you can touch the paper,
till you get the gradations of Turner's engraving.

110. In this exercise, as in the former one, a quarter of an inch worked
to close resemblance of the copy is worth more than the whole subject
carelessly done. Not that in drawing afterwards from Nature you are to
be obliged to finish every gradation in this way, but that, once having
fully accomplished the drawing _something_ rightly, you will
thenceforward feel and aim at a higher perfection than you could
otherwise have conceived, and the brush will obey you, and bring out
quickly and clearly the loveliest results, with a submissiveness which
it would have wholly refused if you had not put it to severest work.
Nothing is more strange in art than the way that chance and materials
seem to favor you, when once you have thoroughly conquered them. Make
yourself quite independent of chance, get your result in spite of it,
and from that day forward all things will somehow fall as you would have
them. Show the camel's hair, and the color in it, that no bending nor
blotting is of any use to escape your will; that the touch and the shade
_shall_ finally be right, if it costs you a year's toil; and from that
hour of corrective conviction, said camel's hair will bend itself to all
your wishes, and no blot will dare to transgress its appointed border.
If you cannot obtain a print from the Liber Studiorum, get a
photograph[28] of some general landscape subject, with high hills and a
village or picturesque town, in the middle distance, and some calm water
of varied character (a stream with stones in it, if possible), and copy
any part of it you like, in this same brown color, working, as I have
just directed you to do from the Liber, a great deal with the point of
the brush. You are under a twofold disadvantage here, however; first,
there are portions in every photograph too delicately done for you at
present to be at all able to copy; and, secondly, there are portions
always more obscure or dark than there would be in the real scene, and
involved in a mystery which you will not be able, as yet, to decipher.
Both these characters will be advantageous to you for future study,
after you have gained experience, but they are a little against you in
early attempts at tinting; still you must fight through the difficulty,
and get the power of producing delicate