t was half done, and begin over again.
William Hunt, of the Old Water-colour, is very neat in his practice; so,
I believe, is Mulready; so is John Lewis; and so are the leading
Pre-Raphaelites, Rossetti only excepted. And there can be no doubt about
the goodness of the advice, if it were only for this reason, that the
more particular you are about your colours the more you will get into a
deliberate and methodical habit in using them, and all true _speed_ in
colouring comes of this deliberation.

Use Chinese white, well ground, to mix with your colours in order to
pale them, instead of a quantity of water. You will thus be able to
shape your masses more quietly, and play the colours about with more
ease; they will not damp your paper so much, and you will be able to go
on continually, and lay forms of passing cloud and other fugitive or
delicately shaped lights, otherwise unattainable except by time.

This mixing of white with the pigments, so as to render them opaque,
constitutes _body_-colour drawing as opposed to _transparent_-colour
drawing and you will, perhaps, have it often said to you that this
body-colour is "illegitimate." It is just as legitimate as oil-painting,
being, so far as handling is concerned, the same process, only without
its uncleanliness, its unwholesomeness, or its inconvenience; for oil
will not dry quickly, nor carry safely, nor give the same effects of
atmosphere without tenfold labour. And if you hear it said that the
body-colour looks chalky or opaque, and, as is very likely, think so
yourself, be yet assured of this, that though certain effects of glow
and transparencies of gloom are not to be reached without transparent
colour, those glows and glooms are _not_ the noblest aim of art. After
many years' study of the various results of fresco and oil painting in
Italy, and of body-colour and transparent colour in England, I am now
entirely convinced that the greatest things that are to be done in art
must be done in dead colour. The habit of depending on varnish or on
lucid tints transparency, makes the painter comparatively lose sight of
the nobler translucence which is obtained by breaking various colours
amidst each other: and even when, as by Correggio, exquisite play of hue
is joined with exquisite transparency, the delight in the depth almost
always leads the painter into mean and false chiaroscuro; it leads him
to like dark backgrounds instead of luminous ones,[235] and to enjoy, in