The American Boy's Handy Book/Chapter 26

One day while the author was sketching, a piece of drawing-paper happened to fall upon the ground in the bright sunlight. As the paper Image missingFig. 161.Shadow cast by a Dandelion. rested on the sward the shadows of the grass and weeds were cast upon it. How beautiful and graceful they were! Stooping down the writer passed his brush over the shadows; the result was a sort of half silhouette, an excellent suggestion for a bit of foreground or a decoration. If the thousands of amateur decorators that are daily engaged in daubing pictures of all manner of unnatural-looking plants upon china would only confine themselves to tracing in one color the simple shadows cast by plants in the sunlight, what graceful and pleasing designs Mother Nature would furnish ​them! How much more pleasant it would be to eat off dishes decorated in this manner than to be called upon to admire and Image missingFig. 162.Shadow cast by an Anemone. eat from china covered with "finiky" little flowers or broad, meaningless daubs of color intended to represent something only known to the artist (?) who conceived the design. Any boy can make the most graceful designs by placing a piece of paper in such a position that the shadow of a flower or fern shall fall upon it. Then with a small paint brush and some ink he may carefully paint in the shadow just as it falls upon the paper. Fig. 161 shows a dandelion, a fac-simile of a sketch made in the manner just described. Fig. 162 is an anemone. Not only can beautiful designs be made, but valuable sets of botanical sketches can be obtained in this manner, as no skill is required with the brush; all that is necessary is to follow the shadow on the paper.

A wooden frame or stretcher might be used with a candle or lamp at night. By tacking the paper over the stretcher, then placing a pot or vase containing plants in front of the light and the stretcher in front of the plants, the shadows of the plants ​will be thrown upon the paper and show through, so that they can be painted upon the opposite side of the paper without any danger of moving either the light or plants.

At most of the artists' material stores in New York there is to be found for sale a sensitive paper which changes color when exposed to the light. If a shadow be cast upon this paper by some object between it and the sunlight, the paper will grow lighter in color all around the shadow, and in a few moments the shadow is marked distinctly by the difference in tints. At this stage the paper, which is of a dark blue color, may be removed, and if it be held under a stream of water the parts that were covered by the shadow will become white and remain so. I have before me a photograph of a large dragon-fly, which shows all the beautiful network of veins in the wings of that insect traced in the most delicate white lines upon a background of dark blue. I allowed the dragon-fly to rest for a few moments upon a piece of sensitive paper and then quickly placed the paper under a hydrant, with the result described.

Photographic paper is not expensive, quite a large sized sheet costing only fifty cents. Many pretty experiments can be tried with this material.

Suppose you have a picture of a horse and want to enlarge it. First draw a line under its feet, and at right angles with this line draw another line in front of the horse's head; divide these lines into equal parts and then carefully rule lines across from these points so as to intersect each other at right angles, as illustrated by Fig. 163. When the horse is all enclosed in squares, take another piece of paper and make exactly the same number of large squares on the paper as there are smaller ones on the horse picture; number the squares on both as in ​the diagrams (Fig. 163). If you will look at the top diagram you will see that the horse's head cuts off one corner of the upper left hand corner square; with your pencil make a line cutting off the same part of the corresponding large square; curve the line like the copy. By again referring to the horse Image missingFig. 163.Enlargement by Squares. picture you will notice that the line of the neck continued strikes exactly at the intersection of the lines 1 and 2; draw it so. The next point the line touches just above is the intersection of the lines 2 and 3; from this point the line of the back runs almost straight to the point on the tail at the intersection of the lines 2 and 6; thus, by finding and connecting the points of intersection you may reproduce the whole horse as illustrated by the diagram. In a similar manner a landscape, figure piece or a plan can be accurately enlarged by a boy who may have little or no talent for drawing, but who for some purpose wishes to reproduce a picture or plan. By making the squares on your drawing-paper exactly the same size as those upon the picture, you can draw a fac-simile of the picture, and by making the squares smaller you may reduce a picture. Remember these hints, for when I tell you how to make a puppet show, although a pattern for each puppet is drawn, there is not space in a book of this size to make all ​the puppets large enough, and many or all may have to be enlarged.

This instrument necessitates an outlay of from fifty cents to a dollar and a half for a lens; unless the reader is fortunate enough to already possess a double convex lens, or what is known among boys as a "burning-glass." A small mirror or piece of looking-glass, a small pane of common window glass, Image missingCamera for Drawing. and an old soap or candle box, or some pine lumber of which to make a box, is all the material required.

Let the box be about eighteen inches long, nine inches deep, and twelve inches wide; fasten the lens in a hole cut for that purpose at one end of the box. A piece of looking-glass must be fixed at an angle of forty-five degrees at the opposite end of the box. The angle may be obtained in this manner: if from where the top of the glass rests against the end board, it measures nine inches to the bottom of the box, then the bottom of the glass should be nine inches from the end of the box.

Grind the surface of one side of the window-pane glass by rubbing it upon a flat stone or sand-paper. Make a lid to the top of the box, as shown in the illustration, and under the lid fasten the ground glass. Paint or blacken the inside of the box, and adjust the parts by experiment, so that when the lens is ​turned toward any object, that object will be immediately reflected upon the piece of ground glass. No great difficulty need be anticipated by any one in the adjustment of the parts of a camera obscura, as it can be easily arrived at by trial.

If a piece of drawing-paper be placed over the ground glass, and the lens turned toward some object, that object will be reflected upon the glass and shown through the paper in all its natural colors, strong enough to be accurately traced and reproduced.

In this manner considerable amusement and instruction can be derived from a home-made camera obscura.

If one of these instruments be taken into a darkened room, and the lens allowed to point out through the window, everything that passes the house will be reflected upon the ground glass, making a sort of moving, colored, puppet show.