The Parents' Review

A Monthly Magazine of Home-Training and Culture

The Fésole Club Papers.

[William Gershom Collingwood, 1854-1932, was an artist in the Lake District. He spent part of his life as John Ruskin's assistant, and became a family friend of Arthur Ransome, "who based his book Swallows and Amazons on his experiences of sailing with the Collingwoods' grandchildren" in Collingwood's boat, called Swallow. He loved Viking/Norse culture. His Fésole Club Papers from Vol 2 and 3 of the Parents' Review were reprinted a decade later in Volumes 14 and 15.]

XXI. On Mouths and Noses

The head in general, and the ear in particular, we have discussed and attempted. Before trying a finished portrait, there are still the three chief features of the face to study in detail -- eyes, nose and mouth. Of these, it is best to leave the eyes until the last, as many good painters do in their actual practice, not only on the principle of the prudent child, who save the sugar for a bonne bouche, but also because any very emphatic point, any high light or crisp dark, is distracting while you are at work on the quieter tones and masses. Its very strength makes other things seem weaker than they really are, and tempts you to over-state their contrasts, and to get the picture harsh in its modeling and violent in its effect.

But the nose and the mouth go together. The symmetrical structure of the mouth is carried through the upper lip and developed into the two nostrils. The same kind of color and curvature runs through both. The same movement that lifts the corners of the mouth into a smile, or depresses them into grimness, lifts or lowers the nostrils in a subtle way, which may be easily missed by a beginner, taking the features separately, and studying them perhaps from different models. And yet the expression of a face depends immensely on this sympathy of mouth and nose.

The chief difficulty in the drawing of these features is to get the markings, the minor incidents, properly placed upon the great features, without cutting up the great features enough to destroy their own general solidity and softness. This is an old story in our experience of art, but never had so important an application as it has now, in our present task.

To illustrate the difficulty in a simple form first, paint a walnut. Here you have an object round as a whole, and yet with its oval outline indented into many smaller roundnesses and corners. It has its solidity as a whole, with one broad graduated light, and one broad quiet dark, and reflected light, just like a smooth egg; and yet both the light and the dark are crossed by grooves, which follow the surface in perspective curves, without being geometrically regular; and each groove has its own light and dark and reflected light, so distinct that they cannot be omitted, and so tender that if they are exaggerated, your drawing will be a map of a walnut, not the picture of one. At the same time the colour of the walnut is easy, compared with that of flesh; its quiet brown and grey need give little trouble.

To understand the mouth and nose -- to learn the grammar of the features -- we need no anatomy, but only a good look at a normal face in its different positions, and a record of our observations: and once learnt, it will be always known. Two positions at least should be drawn, the view of the features seen in "full face" and the "three quarters" view. As before, a separate pencil or chalk study should be made in order to become familiar with the structure, without adding to the difficulties by trying to match subtle colour and to handle wet paint.

Your sitter should not have any unusual peculiarities of feature. An old body without teeth, or a bearded man, or a very ugly person, or perhaps we may add, a very pretty one, should not be chosen: the very pretty one is to be avoided because you will be trying to give the bloom and blush and loveliness, and you will despair of the beauty, and forget the straightforward average facts. Still, better pretty than ugly any day.

For the full face view, get the sitter in a side light so as to display all the modelling, as when you hold a coin or a seal sidewise to the light to see the pattern. Put your drawing board up beside the model and work with plenty of walking back and looking-glass practice, which is fatiguing, but shortest and easiest in the end, as you must have learnt by now. Draw with a soft pencil, marking first the greater spaces dark, and placing them in their right relations one to another. Then shade the lesser and lighter darks, hewing out the shapes like a sculptor, and coming gradually to the delicate and faint lines that mark out the edges of the features; for the whole study depends much more upon modelling than upon contour. There is nothing more difficult than to draw a satisfactory mouth a harsh strong line all round and a blank light for the lips: but a few strong touches, rightly placed, and a little graduated shading will tell the story at once.

Poets have talked about the "Cupid's bow" of a pretty mouth: by which they mean the lines bounding the red of the lips, the double curve above, depressed in the middle, where the hand-hold of an ancient bow would be, and the string hanging slack and forming the under contour of the lower lip. But do not begin by trying to draw that. Start from the actual mouth, the opening between the lips; and express it by its own varied space of dark shade, and not by an even stringy line of black. Then model the little globe or "cherry" in the middle of the upper lip, and the two wings that spread away from it towards the corners of the mouth, which form a figure something like that old Assyrian symbol of the winged globe, the origin of the common or tombstone cherub.

The lower lip is not a bit like a bolster, in a well-formed mouth. You must notice that it is just as much a two-fold, beautifully designed and sculptured thing, as the upper lip. But while the upper lip has its main projection in the middle, the lower has a depression and a division in the middle, and swells out very gently on both sides of this central shallow groove, somewhat as if it had been made of two ripe pears set together and squeezed together, head to head; the two stalks touching the corners of the mouth. With the alternation of forms, the opening of the mouth cannot possibly be a mere line, but is the beautiful space left between two beautiful shapes, which, when your attention is once fixed upon them, you will find easy to trace and delightful to draw.

The upper lip slightly overhangs; and when the light comes from above, there is always a shade upon it, and a shadow from it upon the lower lip. Without that shadow the lower lip will seem to stick out in an ugly way. And under the lower lip, on the white skin, there is a curious little pit with a double ridge crossing it, varying exceedingly in shape and size and strength of marking, but rarely quite absent. So you have to account for a double touch of dark under the mouth, more or less defined; and from it extending both ways a half tone, which fades into light along the under contour of the lower lip, so that the outline is varied in its relief, as all beautiful outlines in nature are. Similarly the outline of the upper lip seen most strongly at the middle of it near the "cherry," fades and is partially lost as it approaches the corners of the mouth. To draw lips with hard lines is impossible: they can be modelled with gradated spaces of shading, but no stringy, meshed pattern of black strokes will really represent them.

Now we must say farewell to the mouth, and travel upwards along the double ridge of the "curtain" of the upper lip, noting that the dark of the groove must not be caricatured. It looks strong because it is surrounded by light, but it is very soft compared with the real darks on the face. Think, in drawing it, of a dimpling wave and not of an iron railroad.

To fix in your mind the make of a nose, imagine that its ridges are the tendrils of a seedling plant which shoot from the face, curls round the nostril and then divides, sending one branch up the hollow and one down towards the mouth, which is like the flower into which it blossoms. You will see this best by turning your model to the three-quarters view; and now that the mouth is sketched, you may put away that drawing, and begin the second-position study, drawing first the nose in the side view. The mouth is easiest to map when seen in full, the nose is easiest from the side. When the side view of the nose is drawn, go on to finish that study by putting in the mouth in perspective, and then go back to the first sketch and complete it with the nose.

In the side view of the nose you have first the nostril, enclosed by the aforesaid tendrils. Then the "ala" or wing of the nose, the shell-like covering of the nostril, which is not papery and thin, but shows its solidity by the line of soft shade just above the nostril. The groove that defines its upper limit must be very tenderly marked, or your nose will sneer. The dark inside the nostril must not be one solid blackness; it is broken by the tendril that runs up into it; and it is modified by a slight transmitted light which shines through the semi-transparent party-wall and "ala." So that everything points to tenderness, graduation, and variety; and -- though it sounds like a superfluous caution -- it cannot be too often said that hard lines and harsh black-and-white won't do for this work.

Yet once more and for a little while longer give your attention; look at the tip of the nose, and see how it is made. In a normal face the nose-tip is not a mere bunch or bulb, stuck on the nostrils. It grows out of them and their surroundings like a beautiful and ingenious piece of architectural decoration. It doesn't matter to us at present why or how it came to be so; but it matters greatly what the facts of the outward appearance are.

The narrow shade above the nostril, that shows the thickness of the "ala," broadens in front of the nostril and becomes a little flattish triangle. There is a corresponding triangle on the other side of the nose, and between the two a central triangle or facet, blunting the edge below the tip as through originally people's noses were hatchet-shaped, but some kindly hand, or amenities of human intercourse in its prehistoric stages, had rubbed down the sharpness. So under the tip there are three triangles meeting in a point below, with their edges and corners very much rounded away. Similarly above the tip there are three triangles still more obliterated, and yet sometimes traceable as facets meeting in a point above, where the bridge begins. The whole tip is made of the model of a well-crystallized, native diamond; though, being anything but adamant, its edges and corners have been rubbed and rounded away, we might imagine, until the facets are almost lost in one smooth mass like a water-worn pebble.

As to the coloring there is little to be said, now that you have painted the ear. Beware of blackness in the darks. The upper lip is less red, as well as less bright, than the lower; it has some greyness, not purple, in it crimson gloom. The nostril is not a black hole; in addition to its own local colour, it is partly lit by transmitted light which is always warm. The half-tones that model the features are grayish, but never purple; mix yellow with the grey as a matter of routine; and even if the grey inclines to green, it is better than a deathly lilac. But with the four colors above-mentioned (the two siennas with crimson and Prussian blue), you will probably find less trouble in making your grays than if you use the semi-opaque cobalt; and the mixture of reds and yellows in this palette, kept very clean, will give you the strong red of the lower lip better than vermilion.

Typed by Ashley R., Sep. 2024; Proofread by LNL, Jan. 2025