Silverpoint

Wooded Countryside

Wooded Countryside, Corot, 1866
Art Institute of Chicago

Corot, Wooded Countryside, 1866. Etching on ivory laid paper.

Pins mark where to look before you draw.

The Art Institute of Chicago · The Charles Deering Collection

Master studyLine + MassThe etchings · 1845 to 1869

Wooded Countryside

Edge texture, nothing inside

1866: a wood with its foliage drawn as dense scribble along the silhouette and against the sky, settling into near-flat hatch inside. The clearest demonstration in Corot of the rule that texture lives at the edge.

Difficulty
Time
about 2 h
You draw with
H, HB and 2B graphite
Texture lives at the edgeBuilding a tree from massesTone from line

Why this one

  • It isolates the edge-texture principle better than any diagram.
  • Short, so it can be repeated.

From your kit

The whole kit →
  1. 1Grafwood H, HB, 2B H, HB for layout and line; 2B for the darks. Long points from the Blackwing on everything up to B.
  2. 2Kneaded eraser and the Mono Zero press-and-lift corrections only; the Mono Zero for a single sharp light.
  3. 3Alpha sketchbook 9 x 6 draw at the book's size and keep the proportions; date the page.
In general, this study asks for
  • Drawing pad or smooth cartridge
  • 2H and H with long points
  • HB for accents
  • Kneaded eraser
  • Sandpaper block

Watch first

All videos →

Trees as masses in graphite, with the edge texture where it belongs.

YouTube
Printmaking process: intaglioMinneapolis Institute of Art · Four minutes that make every etching in this catalogue legible: ground, needle, acid, ink, wipe, press.

The plan

3 stages · ~100 min
  1. 1

    Silhouette by sky shapes

    20 min

    Draw the sky shapes between and above the trees; the silhouette appears.

    Checklist0 / 1
  2. 2

    Interior flat, edge busy

    70 min

    Fill the interior with even hatch in one or two layers. Then the edge: broken, varied scribble pointing outward, only along the silhouette.

    A single foliage clump whose interior is flat tone and whose outer edge carries all the leaf texture, with a zoom showing the scribbled edge markszoom: broken, varied,pointing outwardThe eye reads texture at edges and assumes it continues inside. Give it the edge andnothing else.Interior texture flattens the form and kills the light. Trust the edge.
    FigureFlat inside, busy at the edge.
    Checklist0 / 2
  3. 3

    Audit

    10 min

    Squint. Does it read as a wood? Did texture creep inside? Lift it.

    Checklist0 / 1

What it should look like

  • A wood whose leaves are all at the edges and whose body is quiet tone.

Where it goes wrong

  • Scribble across the whole mass. Texture feels like progress. Erase the interior back to hatch.

Log this session

Start the clock when you pick up the pencil. Stop it when you put it down. Log it. Every session counts toward the box.

00:00of ~120 min

Status

How did it go?

Up nextIn the Dunes: Souvenir of the Woods of The Hague

Before this, ideally

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