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5.

go on during the course of executing the piece of work.  But with water color, all that process of selection and arrangement has to be completed first.  With some of these studies I have made the pencil drawing at one time, and not done the painting itself until some days later when similar light conditions prevailed.  This gave me time to examine the drawing more than once, asking myself, is there too much, or is there too little?  Does it balance? Is everything well -drawn?  Does anything cause a sense of nervousness in me,a sense of something not being quite right?

This would seem to be a purely intellectual process, but there is in it too an element of the hunch.  These hunches are actually based on an accumulation of experience and the painting of many pictures. When you say that something tells you the design isn't quite right. the something is actually your accumulated sense of balance and measurement.  The best thing in such a case is not] to plunge right ahead with the painting itself and trust that it will work out, for that may end only in much waste effort, but to study out this problem, to go away from the picture and come back to it with fresh eyes. 

This process can be so tedious and painstaking and protracted that by the time you are actually ready to begin you have lost your original enthusiasm for the subject; and in that case I believe it is often wisest to leave the actual painting until another day when you can begin afresh.  However, do not make the assumption that there are now no further obstacles, that the picture just flows off the end of the brush.  Now comes into play a different kind of craftsmanly knowledge---the know-ledge of how to achieve the effects for which the design is intended, how to discipline water and paint to behave the way you want them to.  Nothing but long experience and study of methods can give this knowledge.  By many painting of skies one learns a method of painting skies to convey the lightness or the density of the air,the movement and texture of clouds,the shading of colors through a rainbow variety that still re-