Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER VI. CRAYON PORTRAITS. Crayon is especially adapted to portraiture, on account of the brilliant effects of which it is capable of producing, as well as the great softness and delicacy of finish which may be obtained by its use. Portraits should, of course, always be taken from life if possible, though if the person be an invalid or is for any other reason unable to give many sittings, a photograph may be used for the beginning. The portrait is carried on from this until well advanced ; if one or two sittings from life can then be had in finishing, it will be a great advantage, especially in regard to the expression. In portraits of children a photograph is frequently a great assistance, particularlyif the artist has not had much experience. In all such cases, however, it is best to decide upon the pose, and sketch it from life, and then have the photograph taken in the pose you have selected. In this way, the light and shade are arranged to suit the artist, and the pose being decided upon by him, the portrait will have the effect of being drawn from life instead of being merely a copy from a conventional photograph. In general the effect of light used by photographers is exactly the reverse of that chosen by artists. It will be noticed that ordinary photographs have the greater part of the face either in shadow or covered by strong half-tints. An artist, on the contrary, in posing a head for a portrait, prefers exactly the opposite arrangement, selecting broad and simple effects of light with only enough shadow to give the necessary variety and relief to the features. When arranging the preliminaries for aportrait, there are several things to be considered. In the first place, study the head carefully and see which view is most agreeable. Somet...