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your brush and draw the sky, which will give the edge of the clouds. Watch with attention the exquisite gradation of tone where it shows itself above the cloud to the top of your picture, to where it touches your extreme -distance. The form and colour gradation of a good sky will convey a sense of perspective as truly as the landscape below. You have now secured the tone and form of sky which is in sympathy with the other parts of your picture. You have painted in your blue, so little after all, but with a risk out of all proportion to its area. Your clouds may be now modelled with more deliberation, painting them with grey at the undersides-a grey composed of rose madder, cobalt and yellow ochre. (See chapter on "Skies", p. 64.)
If the under painting be properly prepared, the sky should be finished at one painting, though this purpose must necessarily be governed by size and other obvious circumstances. But what I want you to do now, and what is at this point of more importance, is to paint the sky into the edge of the trees. You will remember how in another chapter (see P. 54) I discussed the method of dealing with this borderland of sky and foliage.
Your picture having been brought to this point, you begin to feel you are within measurable distance of the end. Here I suggest that, if the conditions of Nature are favourable, and there is no probability of a change in your subject, you should give the canvas a rest in order to let it dry. Again bear in mind that you cannot patch blue. If you have failed in the sky, the better plan is to take it all off to the under layer with an ivory palette knife and begin afresh.So few artists paint a blue sky well because they try to patch up the blue. It is difficult to paint a white cloud on a blue sky. It will always be a patch. Of course, after many years of experience you may be able to venture on some things which it would have been insane to attempt at an earlier stage, and this of adding blue to blue is one.
Your picture is dry; you have oiled it out, and taken it to Nature again. You may have thought the time consumed for the, preliminary studies was wasted, but, believe me, it is by these studies that you gain the knowledge and confidence which enable you to reach a successful issue.
Suppose it had commenced to rain, and continued raining, or that the atmosphere had remained grey for some considerable time, and at the end of this period the weather cleared only to reveal the fact that the trees and grass had completely changed their colourl What then? As I have said before, your studies would be of the greatest value as reference. Here you find the benefit of the policy of making sketches and careful studies before com- mencing your picture. But if you are fortunate enough to have a continuation of suitable weather, you will have the opportunity of comparing the component parts of your picture with each other and Nature during the time the effect is maintained.
You now watch keenly for the subtle and more indefinite passages of colour, such as the reflected or re-reflected lights which give it quality. As depends mainly on the dignity of your composition, so quality depends upon the realisation of the more indefinite variations which make up the masses. You now select from Nature just those things that will sustain the character of your material. Your trees cannot show every leaf. Although there are those who have thought otherwise, like the old Dutch landscape painters, they have come to grief. You must realise what is infinitely finer-the portrayal of foliage so as to indicate aggregation of leaves in thesuggestion of the mass. Your painting must give the sensation that the masses of foliage are made up of multitudes of leaves, though they are not separately indicated. A house in the middle distance you know is built of bricks, but you would not for one moment think of depicting the individual courses; you would treat the wall as a tone of colour,
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