d this general law is to be observed in all your
studies: whatever you draw, draw completely and unalteringly, else you
never know if what you have done is right, or whether you _could_ have
done it rightly had you tried. There is nothing _visible_ out of which
you may not get useful practice.

Next, to put the leaves on your boughs. Gather a small twig with four or
five leaves on it, put it into water, put a sheet of light-coloured or
white paper behind it, so that all the leaves may be relieved in dark
from the white field; then sketch in their dark shape carefully with
pencil as you did the complicated boughs, in order to be sure that all
their masses and interstices are right in shape before you begin
shading, and complete as far as you can with pen and ink, in the manner
of Fig. 6., which is a young shoot of lilac.

[Illustration: FIG. 6.]

You will probably, in spite of all your pattern drawings, be at first
puzzled by leaf foreshortening; especially because the look of
retirement or projection depends not so much on the perspective of the
leaves themselves as on the double sight of the two eyes. Now there are
certain artifices by which good painters can partly conquer this
difficulty; as slight exaggerations of force or colour in the nearer
parts, and of obscurity in the more distant ones; but you must not
attempt anything of this kind. When you are first sketching the leaves,
shut one of your eyes, fix a point in the background, to bring the point
of one of the leaves against, and so sketch the whole bough as you see
it in a fixed position, looking with one eye only. Your drawing never
can be made to look like the object itself, as you see that object with
_both_ eyes,[215] but it can be made perfectly like the object seen with
one, and you must be content when you have got a resemblance on these
terms.

In order to get clearly at the notion of the thing to be done, take a
single long leaf, hold it with its point towards you, and as flat as you
can, so as to see nothing of it but its thinness, as if you wanted to
know how thin it was; outline it so. Then slope it down gradually
towards you, and watch it as it lengthens out to its full length, held
perpendicularly down before you. Draw it in three or four different
positions between these extremes, with its ribs as they appear in each
position, and you will soon find out how it must be.

Draw first only two or three of the leaves; then larger clusters; and