William Blake and his Illustrations to The Divine Comedy in Ideas of Good and Evil by William Butler Yeats.

“colouring does not depend upon where the colours are put, but upon where the light and dark are put, and all depends upon the form or outline” [via]

Consider also:

  1. “There are many mediums in the means–none, oh, not a jot, not a shadow of a jot, in the end of great art. In a picture whose merit is to be excessively brilliant, it can’t be too brilliant, but individual tints may be too brilliant…. We must not begin with medium, but think always on excess and only use medium to make excess more abundantly excessive.”
  2. “Inspiration was to see the permanent and characteristic in all forms, and if you had it not, you must needs imitate with a languid mind the things you saw or remembered, and so sink into the sleep of nature where all is soft and melting.”
  3. “His praise of a severe art had been beyond price had his age rested a moment to listen”
  4. “Leave out this line and you leave out life itself; and all is chaos again, and the line of the Almighty must be drawn out upon it before man or beast can exist.”
  5. “now he wrote, ‘O glory, and O delight! I have entirely reduced that spectrous fiend to his station’–he had overcome the merely reasoning and sensual portion of the mind–‘whose annoyance has been the ruin of my labours for the last twenty years of my life….”