PENCIL DRAWING.—No. 1.
Reading edition
This beautiful and graceful art may be acquired by every girl and boy in the land who will take the necessary steps. And they are pleasant steps.
A pretty drawing-book, a nicely cut No. 2 Faber's drawing pencil, a piece of black India rubber, some pieces of tissue-paper to cover the drawings, unless the drawing-book is furnished with tissue-paper. These are the implements required. In this pencil drawing which I now recommend there are no lines, straight and slanting, repeated to utter weariness. This is object drawing, and drawing from nature also, and the objects are inexhaustible, being the leaves which nature gives to every plant and tree.
Drawings of leaves are beautiful when well done. The writer knew a young girl of twelve or thirteen years who began with drawing simple, easy leaves, and went on to more difficult ones season after season. Her drawing-books were charming; and not this alone, for she acquired a fund of pleasant knowledge, which loses none of its delight as time goes on. She began with leaves, picked from the house plants which her mother cultivated.
As the spring came on, she sought the wild leaves in the woods. No one who has not tried it can judge of the interest felt in the beauty and wonderful variety in the growth and shapes of leaves. They seem endless; and when to these are added the leaves of forest trees, the enchanting maples, beeches, birches, and hosts of others, it may be imagined that young fingers may find ample employment in portraying these, to say nothing of the wild flowers which come on in the New England woods—the early anemones, hepatica, bloodroot, and all the flowery train—as the season advances.
This young girl learned to draw with great accuracy, and to this day (for it is years since she began) her ready pencil can sketch any object with ease and skill, the beginning of which was the effort to draw a leaf of smilax.
I have a few simple outlines of leaves ready, but will reserve them for another time.