There is not the least difficulty in doing a thing if you only know how
to do it; the trouble is to explain your method.
"I could put this right if I had a brush in my hand," said Dick, despairingly,
over the modelling of a chin that Maisie complained would not "look flesh,"--it
was the same chin that she had scraped out with the palette knife,--"but I find
it almost impossible to teach you. There's a queer grim Dutch touch about your
painting that I like; but I've a notion that you're weak in drawing. You
foreshorten as though you never used the model, and you've caught Kami's pasty
way of dealing with flesh in shadow. Then, again, though you don't know it
yourself, you shirk hard work. Suppose you spend some of your time on line
lone. Line doesn't allow of shirking. Oils do, and three square inches of
flashy, tricky stuff in the corner of a pic sometimes carry a bad thing off,--
as I know. That's immoral. Do line-work for a little while, and then I can tell
more about your powers, as old Kami used to say."
Maisie protested; she did not care for the pure line.
"I know," said Dick. "You want to do your fancy heads with a bunch of flowers
at the base of the neck to hide bad modelling." The red-haired girl laughed a
little.
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