Manual arts

“ Such principles as symmetry, balance, rhythm, emphasis, harmony in form, mass, value, and color can be inculcated by solving the simplest as well as the most complicated problems. A graded series of exercises can be undertaken by the student that will, with a comparatively small amount of manual skill carry him a considerable distance in the understanding of the principles of design upon which all creative art rests. Another advantage is that, in the process, [Pg 484] considerable skill in freehand drawing also can be acquired. ”

“ This is why I would strongly urge all who wish to enrich their embroideries with the human figure to practise drawing first. I would further suggest that the drawing should be chiefly from the antique, and the study altogether more with regard to typical than individual forms, as this training is not for the painting of ‘pictures,’ but for the sake of knowing what are the elements of human beauty and how they ought to be applied or modified. Neither am I including the study of design, which, as I have before remarked, is a study in itself. ”

“ Finally the student reaches the engine, every part of which is made the subject of exhaustive study; the facts of every part are represented on paper, working drawings of every part are made, and every part is reproduced in steel and iron in miniature, and, as a triumph of drawing, a representation on paper of the completed engine is produced.
The value of drawing as an educational agency is simply incalculable. It is the first step in manual training. It brings the eye and the mind into relations of the closest intimacy, and makes the hand the organ of both. ”

“ Our amateurs cannot be persuaded but that they may produce some kind of art by their fancy or sensibility, without going through the necessary manual toil. That is entirely hopeless. Without a certain number, and that a very great number, of steady acts of hand—a practice as careful and constant as would be necessary to learn any other manual business—no drawing is possible. On the other side, the workman, and those who employ him, are continually trying to produce art by trick or habit of fingers, without using their fancy or sensibility. ”

“ In furthering the work of the first group, the topics so familiar to the art teacher of our modern schools are treated—landscape, plants, life, and still life. In the second group are presented the principles of perspective, of industrial drawing, of color harmony, and most important of all, the principles of pure design. In the third group are placed creative exercises in composition, in decorative design, and in many forms of manual training. ”

“ The art courses are now arranged in progressive series of synthetic exercises in line, dark-and-light and color. Composition is made the basis of all work in drawing, painting, designing and modelling—of house decoration and industrial arts—of normal courses and of art training for children, After twenty years' experience in teaching I find that the principles hold good under varying conditions, and produce results justifying full confidence. They bring to the student, whether designer, craftsman, sculptor or painter an increase of creative power ”

“ We may conclude from this brief statement of the situation that it is desirable to organize and have courses in our manual training and mechanical drawing and that whatever system is adopted it must make allowance for emphasis upon both the thought element and upon skill. ”

“ Again, with reference not to the application of mechanical contrivances but to their invention; is not, it may be inquired, the title of artist due to the inventor of some of the astonishingly complex and astonishingly efficient machines of modern-times? Does he not spend as Perfected machines: are they works of
fine art? much thought, labour, genius as any sculptor or musician in perfecting his construction according to his ideal, and is not the construction when it is done—so finished, so responsive in all its parts, so almost human—is not that worthy to be called a work of fine art? ”

“ How, then, is a work of art produced? By a mere haphazard process? Assuredly not. In the first place, the mere mechanical achievement of reproducing a drawing or painting in the form of a print is a marvel. We accept this as a matter of course, as we do all other manufactured articles. In this age of industrial miracles, we have no time to praise one above another. Behind the machinery is the artist with his simple tools, pencil, brush, and color. ”

“ But the real training in design arises from manual work—the playthings, toys and utensils the boy makes for use. They need not be beautiful nor is there excuse for clumsiness in construction. One cannot expect even the mature child to take much interest in design in the abstract, but when he meets the subject on a common-sense basis, as a part of some personal problem, design—even taste in color and form—acquires definite standing in his esteem. ”

“ Conditions surrounding a pupil in mechanical drawing classes are very similar to those he finds in his regular academic classes and he can readily be brought to understand that quietness, and orderliness with seriousness of purpose are as necessary a part of his manual training as of his academic work. ”

“ In the case of the engraver’s press, there exists behind the industry of the printer the art of the engraver, which, if the engraver is also the free inventor of the design, is then a fine art, or, if he is but the interpreter of the invention of another, is then in its turn a semi-mechanical skill applied in aid of the fine art of the first inventor. In the case of the weaver’s loom there is, behind the mechanical industry which directs the loom at its given task, the fine art, or what ought to be the fine art, of the designer who has contrived the pattern. ”

“ Many occupations, which are generally supposed to [Pg 127] depend upon the understanding, and which do probably depend in the first instance upon the understanding, become by practice purely mechanical. This is the case in many of the imitative arts. A person unused to drawing, exerts a great deal of attention in copying any new object ”

“ Wherever there is a disposition for the art of design, it is cultivated, and in consequence of the general proficiency in this most useful of the fine arts, travellers represent to our view the manners and scenery of the countries which they visit, as well by the pencil as the pen. By means of two fortunate discoveries in the art of engraving, these graphic representations are brought within the reach of whole classes who were formerly precluded by the expense of such things from these sources of gratification and instruction. ”

“ A single word of advice before introducing the elementary work connected with mechanical drawing: if the student should experience difficulty in mastering the diagrams and curves abounding in this book, let him consult an experienced draughtsman or teacher, who, by a few strokes of a lead pencil, can easily make them plain; that knowledge—which cannot be printed or self-taught—termed the Craftsman’s Art, is communicated largely by personal telling and showing, from man to man; in drawing, this help should be thankfully availed of, when necessity arises. ”

“ How much better our carriages would be if we worked from drawings as carefully planned out and executed as these. Many of our artisans could, with a little instruction, draw quite as well, and by degrees would learn to draw with as much artistic taste and sense of the beautiful. Some artisans are now being instructed in the art of design, and I trust the day is not far distant when every workman will see that his son learns drawing as part of his education, and as the essential preliminary to any technical education which is to follow. ”

“ All this time that you have been studying mechanism you should have had a sketch book or pad of note paper, and made free hand sketches of mechanical movements which interested you and of various machine details. You should accustom yourself to use drawing as a means of expressing ideas, just as you use written words, so that it becomes a second nature to you to sketch anything you wish to remember or describe. If you work from blue-prints in the shop, or if you can borrow some to study, this will help you to understand how a drawing is made. ”

“ One artist makes it a thick line with a blunt pen, another a thin line with a fine pen, and another, like Moullier, makes it with a series of dots, but each of these methods is a matter of technic, and the rules of technic are arbitrary, not fixed as are the rules for drawing. You may invent your own technic, but you cannot invent perspective. ”

“ As engaging the emotions and the imagination, they have the qualities which give the fine arts their quality. As demanding method or skill, the adaptation of tools to materials with constantly increasing perfection, they involve the element of technique indispensable to artistic production. ”

“ Arts and Crafts schools, so that a student may really acquire a practical working knowledge of the peculiar requirements of design to be reproduced in any process of manufacture, instead of being launched on the world with vague general ideas of drawing and painting, but ignorant of how to apply them. ”

“ But let this be as it may, what design needs, when it has derived from the judgement the mental image of anything, is that the hand, through the study and practice of many years, may be free and apt to draw and to express correctly, with the pen, the silver-point, the charcoal, the chalk, or other instrument, whatever nature has created. ”

“ Mechanical aid in rendering one language into another is precisely the sort of aid which must be most scrupulously avoided. The mere ability to hold a pencil and copy the strokes line by line does not even make up the alphabet of the craft. You might spend your life putting tracing paper over Raphael's Madonna della Sedia without ever getting more than a caricature of the original. It takes a long apprenticeship and a specially developed skill to enable a painter to produce on canvas a really worthy copy of a great master. ”

“ Great as we think our advancement in the arts has been,—the mechanical part of them, at least,—all the efforts of the lithographer, the wood-cutter, and even the line-engraver, to reproduce the spirit or the very lines of this work, have been but partially successful. ”

“ But whereas the pictorial artist or picture painter carries his own work through to completion, is designer and craftsman in one; in short, the designer for some industrial purpose, unless he is his own craftsman, must make his design also a working drawing to conform to certain strict technical conditions, such as the nature of the material and the method of reproduction, certain limits of size and number of colours to be used and so forth. ”

“ This adaptability to the talents of the craftsman must already have been presented in that which is of an inferior and distorted type before the genius of classical beauty can associate these powers of mechanical facility with the forms of technical perfection. Then, at last, when that which is purely mechanical work is confronted with no further insuperable difficulty, is art enabled to proceed in the elaboration of a form, the practice in working out which is at the same time an elaboration which is in the closest relationship to the progressive advance of both content and form. ”

“ Drawing is one of the arts; art relates to something to be done, and art in the industrial and mechanical sense aims chiefly at utility, and is governed by exact rules; hence mechanical drawing—so-called—tends first to be useful and helpful, and second to accuracy in execution, including most minute details ”

“ Industrial Arts Design develops the principles of industrial design in a new and logical form which, it is believed, will simplify the teaching of craft design. Chapters I to V deal with the elementary problems confronting the designer as he begins the first steps on his working drawing; Chapters VI to VIII show the methods by which he may express his individuality through contour or outline enrichment, while Chapters IX to XVII explain the treatment of the most difficult form of decoration, that of surface enrichment. ”

“ The tools are driven with a mallet or with the palm of the hand, but in most cases with the latter.
6. A capacity for designing, and a knowledge of drawing and modelling, are particularly necessary to make a finished carver. Without these qualifications, at least in some degree, one may be a mechanic, but not an artist. The subject most difficult of execution, is the human figure, and in producing it with accuracy, the same qualifications in the artist are required, and the same general process is pursued, as in producing it in marble. ”

“ In this time the technical details of the art were perfected; colour-printing rose from its first and simplest processes to the highest point of achievement; and a wealth of admirable book and broadside illustrations was produced that rendered incalculable service to industrial art as well as to knowledge in nearly all its branches, and ministered largely to the healthy amusement of a people who are as thorough and hearty in their play as in their work. ”

“ The progress of refinement rarely supplies these arts with better objects of imitation. It may indeed improve the instruments which are necessary to the mechanical operations of the musician, the sculptor, and the painter. ”

“ But, in rounding out the more formal subjects it is well to look a little outside the rigid lines of mechanics into the methods of nature, for no system of teaching drawing is complete that does not include some explanations for sketching from nature—the objects being always around the student, the eye always clear to see and the hand only needing the training to make permanent the impressions received. ”