shadows you can gradate more perfectly; no little
gaps and rents you can fill; no forms you can more delicately define:
and do not _rush_ at any of the errors or incompletions thus discerned,
but efface or supply slowly, and you will soon find your drawing take
another look. A very useful expedient in producing some effects, is to
wet the paper, and then lay the colour on it, more or less wet,
according to the effect you want. You will soon see how prettily it
gradates itself as it dries; when dry, you can reinforce it with
delicate stippling when you want it darker. Also, while the colour is
still damp on the paper, by drying your brush thoroughly, and touching
the colour with the brush so dried, you may take out soft lights with
great tenderness and precision. Try all sorts of experiments of this
kind, noticing how the colour behaves; but remembering always that your
final results must be obtained, and can only be obtained, by pure work
with the point, as much as in the pen drawing.

You will find also, as you deal with more and more complicated subjects,
that Nature's resources in light and shade are so much richer than
yours, that you cannot possibly get all, or anything _like_ all, the
gradations of shadow in any given group. When this is the case,
determine first to keep the broad masses of things distinct: if, for
instance, there is a green book, and a white piece of paper, and a black
inkstand in the group, be sure to keep the white paper as a light mass,
the green book as a middle tint mass, the black inkstand as a dark mass;
and do not shade the folds in the paper, or corners of the book, so as
to equal in depth the darkness of the inkstand. The great difference
between the masters of light and shade, and imperfect artists, is the
power of the former to draw so delicately as to express form in a
dark-coloured object with little light, and in a light-coloured object
with little darkness; and it is better even to leave the forms here and
there unsatisfactorily rendered than to lose the general relations of
the great masses. And this observe, not because masses are grand or
desirable things in your composition (for with composition at present
you have nothing whatever to do), but because it is a _fact_ that things
do so present themselves to the eyes of men, and that we see paper,
book, and inkstand as three separate things, before we see the wrinkles,
or chinks, or corners of any of the three. Understand, theref