Paths

Two weeks for a complete beginner: kit, control, the value scale, and the first two master copies. Twenty minutes a day.

Italy in pencil, then the pen drawings: the young Corot's exactness, from the two-minute envelope to Narni.

Squint, notan, the three divisions, trees as masses, then the charcoals and the Souvenirs. Buy willow charcoal in week two.

Etchings, clichés-verre and lithographs: tone from line, negative drawing, crayon on stone. The bridge between the two halves.

Eye level, one point, the broken line, counted tone, then every Forrest plate from Old College Wynd to Dryburgh.

Arches, tracery, mouldings, masonry, roofs, windows, ruins: the Architecture unit with its master plates attached.

The Corot nobody studies: a priest, a peasant girl, a nude, a reader, and the mythologies, all built as masses.

Corot's architecture gathered, then Forrest's Castle and Tolbooth: the building as a mass in light.

Two full master copies, your own fusion drawing, and the souvenir. Clear a weekend.

All forty-nine sessions of the original course, unit by unit. The long road.

Whistler, Haden, Lalanne, Legros, Cameron and Bone: the line Forrest learned from, copied in graphite from the Thames to the Royal Mile. Line as tone, finish in the middle, and a doorway as the darkest dark.

The hardest-looking pencil work in the catalogue, in the order that makes it possible: Bléry's plants, Ruskin's capital, Rousseau's oak, Bone's cathedral, and Menzel's sluice as the summit.

Subtractive drawing: lay the dark, take the lights out. Whistler's Venice, Lalanne's bridge, Palmer's tower and sunrise, Menzel's falls, and Corot's cliche-verre scratching.