Page:The practice of water-colour painting (IA cu31924014501971).pdf/195

and not stretch unequally. It has a pleasant surface texture and it takes well the body-colour which he prefers for practically the whole of his work. He mixes white with almost all his colours and consequently makes his pigments semi-opaque, but as he lays them on in thin washes rather than in solid or heavily-loaded touches, the grain of the linen helps to give freshness to the brushwork and to enhance the interest of the handling.

He attaches considerable importance to the maintenance of a certain evenness of opacity in the colours while they are being applied – so as to avoid the discordant effect which would come from combining solid touches and transparent washes in the same painting. To this end he often mixes Chinese white with the water in which he dips his brushes, and thereby compels himself to carry white evenly into all the pigments with which he is working. The result is, naturally, more consistent than it would be if the white were added to the colours on the palette more or less at haphazard.

When he is painting on paper instead of linen