ive
power this quickness and facility of execution are absolutely essential.
The waves of emotion, under the influence of which the eye really sees
in any artistic sense, do not last long enough to allow of a slow,
painstaking manner of execution. There must be no hitch in the machinery
of expression when the consciousness is alive to the realisation of
something fine. Fluency of hand and accuracy of eye are the things your
academic studies should have taught you, and these powers will be needed
if you are to catch the expression of any of the finer things in form
that constitute good drawing.

Try and express yourself in as simple, not as complicated a manner as
possible. Let every touch mean something, and if you don't see what to
do next, don't fill in the time by meaningless shading and scribbling
until you do. Wait awhile, rest your eye by looking away, and then see
if you cannot find something right that needs doing.

Before beginning a drawing, it is not a bad idea to study carefully the
work of some master draughtsman whom the subject to be drawn may
suggest. If you do this carefully and thoughtfully, and take in a full
enjoyment, your eye will unconsciously be led to see in nature some of
the qualities of the master's work. And you will see the subject to be
drawn as a much finer thing than would have been the case had you come
to it with your eye unprepared in any way. Reproductions are now so good
and cheap that the best drawings in the world can be had for a few
pence, and every student should begin collecting reproductions of the
things that interest him.

This is not the place to discuss questions of health, but perhaps it
will not be thought grandmotherly to mention the extreme importance of
nervous vitality in a fine draughtsman, and how his life should be
ordered on such healthy lines that he has at his command the maximum
instead of the minimum of this faculty. After a certain point, it is a
question of vitality how far an artist is likely to go in art. Given two
men of equal ability, the one leading a careless life and the other a
healthy one, as far as a healthy one is possible to such a
supersensitive creature as an artist, there can be no doubt as to the
result. It is because there is still a lingering idea in the minds of
many that an artist must lead a dissipated life or he is not really an
artist, that one feels it necessary to mention the subject. This idea
has evidently arisen from the inab