United States or Costa Rica ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Skipping the mouth, he continued the streak from the lower lip down the chin, under which it melted into a tender half-tint made by a smudge of yellow ochre and charcoal. This vigorous touch seemed to rouse the painter's spirit in Petawanaquat, for he pushed the boy out at arm's length, drew himself back, frowned, glared, and breathed hard.
Is it that the injured and indignant soul so vindicates its own essential and divine strength, and says, unconsciously, to the most uncontrolled anguish, "There is in me a life no mortal accident can invade; the breath of God is not altogether extinct in any blast of man's devising; shake, torture, assault the outer tenement, darken its avenues with fire to stifle, and drench its approaches with seas to drown, there is that within that God alone can vanquish, yours is but a finite terror"? Half-crazed as I was, the fern-bed attracted me, as I said, and I flung myself wearily down on the leaves, whose healing and soothing odor stole up like a cloud all about me; and I lay there in the sun, noting with pertinacious accuracy every leaf or bloom that was within the range of sight, the dark green leaves of the wax-flower springing from their red stem, veined and threaded with creamy white, stiff and quaint in form and growth, the bending sprays of goldenrod that bowed their light and brittle stems over me, swaying gently to and fro in the gentle wind, the tiny scarlet cups of moss that held a little drop of dew brimming over their rims of fire, a spark in the ashy gray moss-beds where they stood, the shrinking and wan wood-asters, branched out widely, but set with meagre bloom, every half-tint of the lichens, that scantily fed from the relentless granite rock, yet clung to its stern face with fearless persistence, the rough seams and velvet green moss-tufts of the oak-trunks, the light that pierced the dingy hue of oak-leaves with vivid and informing crimson: all these stamped themselves on my mind with inevitable minuteness; the great wheel of Fate rolled over me, and I bore the marks even of its ornamental rim; the grooves in its tire left traces of its track.
The relation of a half-tint to the highest light, which is represented by the white paper, the relation of a shadow to the deepest black, which is represented by the chalk pencil, is easy enough to perceive in a drawing; but when the work is in colour the values, although not less real, are more difficult to estimate.
He had caught every half-tint, even the slight ivory-like yellowness, the nearly imperceptible blueish tone under the eyes, and was just in the act of seizing a little mole upon the forehead, when he suddenly heard behind him the voice of the mother, crying "Oh, never mind that! that is not necessary!
For, not only was it the strongest, and susceptible of the highest charge of coloring, but it had also the advantage of grouping together all the principal delinquents of the trial, and affording a gradation of hue, from the showy and prominent enormities of the Governor-General and Sir Elijah Impey in the front of the picture, to the subordinate and half-tint iniquity of the Middletons and Bristows in the back-ground.
The man is high up on the right-hand corner, the woman is in the middle of the picture, and Degas has been careful to place her in front of the opening between the tables, for by so doing he was able to carry his half-tint right through the picture.
The shadow of a great cloud hung over all the city; the contrasting colours of its blue and red roofs were lost in the uniform half-tint, through which here and there floated upward, like white flakes of foam, the smoke of freshly kindled fires.
When the harmony of the coloring of a picture, especially in a branch of art in which color goes for so much, has been duly considered and determined on, it would not do to have that which was intended for a scarlet robe turning out a crimson one, nor a brilliant emerald-green changed to a bottle-green, nor, even yet more fatal, the delicate azures and lilacs and grays of a distant landscape changed to comparative opacity, or indeed altered by the shadow of a half-tint from that which the artist's eye has designed for them.
Word Of The Day