perhaps even eyes are most
beautiful in dimness), she would be sorry if her cheeks did; and which
of us would wish to polish a rose?

[236] But not shiny or greasy. Bristol board, or hot-pressed imperial,
or grey paper that feels slightly adhesive to the hand, is best. Coarse,
gritty, and sandy papers are fit only for blotters and blunderers; no
good draughtsman would lay a line on them. Turner worked much on a thin
tough paper, dead in surface; rolling up his sketches in tight bundles
that would go deep into his pockets.

[237] I insist upon this unalterability of colour the more because I
address you as a beginner, or an amateur; a great artist can sometimes
get out of a difficulty with credit, or repent without confession. Yet
even Titian's alterations usually show as stains on his work.

[238] It is, I think, a piece of affectation to try to work with few
colours; it saves time to have enough tints prepared without mixing, and
you may at once allow yourself these twenty-four. If you arrange them in
your colour-box in the order I have set them down, you will always
easily put your finger on the one you want.

Cobalt. Smalt. Antwerp blue. Prussian blue.
Black. Gamboge. Emerald green. Hooker's green.
Lemon yellow. Cadmium yellow. Yellow ochre. Roman ochre.
Raw sienna. Burnt sienna. Light red. Indian red.
Mars orange. Ext't of vermilion. Carmine. Violet carmine.
Brown madder. Burnt umber. Vandyke brown. Sepia.

Antwerp blue and Prussian blue are not very permanent colours, but you
need not care much about permanence in your own work as yet, and they
are both beautiful; while Indigo is marked by Field as more fugitive
still, and is very ugly. Hooker's green is a mixed colour, put in the
box merely to save you loss of time in mixing gamboge and Prussian blue.
No. 1. is the best tint of it. Violet carmine is a noble colour for
laying broken shadows with, to be worked into afterwards with other
colours.

If you wish to take up colouring seriously, you had better get Field's
"Chromatography" at once; only do not attend to anything it says about
principles or harmonies of colour; but only to its statements of
practical serviceableness in pigments, and of their operations on each
other when mixed, &c.

[239] A more methodical, though, under general circumstances, uselessly
prolix way, is to cut a square hole,