FREE-HAND DRAWING. Drawing in which the hand receives no assistance from ineehanieal ap pliances is called free-hand drawing. it lies at the foundation of all the arts of design, sculpture not excepted. and constitutes an art in itself. Its greatest masters. like Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci. and Michelangelo, have been among the geniuses of their times. Even the greatness of smell colorists as Titian and Veronese depends in large measure upon their consum mate See PAINTINc:.
The restrictions under which the artist labors in seeking to represent in black and white upon a plane surface the multitudinous aspect- of visible objects have already been referred to. The difier ent kinds and schools of drawing are distin guished by the ways in which these restrictions are evaded or overcome. In outline drawings and in sonic sketches, only the exterior outlines and contours or salient edges and marking- of an ob ject or scene are shown. The power which these may have of evoking complete mental pictures is indicated in the simple outline d ra \ \ on Greek vases and by black silhouettes of faces and figures. The power of pure line, even divest ed of acommanying color. to suggest the varied modeling of surfaces. and to expre-, the
minutest detail, is admirably exemplified in Jap anese pictorial art. The European schools. on the other hand, lay great stress upon mines, or the rendering of the varied luminosities and grada tions of light and dark in the objects represented. by corresponding gradations of the tones of the drawing: that is. of the mixture, of black and white produced by the use of the pen-and-ink. pen cil, crayon, charcoal. or sepia-brush upon the paper. Even different colors may be to a certain extent suggested, or rather interpreted, in black and white by a careful rendering of their appar ent values: a dark red, for instance, being indi cated by darker shading than a light blue or a yellow. The great artists of the Renaissance stand midway between the Japanese exponents of pure line and the modern European interpreters of values. Their drawings are wonderful for the purity, vigor. and delicacy of their lines.. a, well as for the skillful though somewhat conventional `modeling' of the forms as expressed by shading. See the articles LINE, and IMPRESSIONIST SCHOOL OF PAINTING.