The palette reflects the chromatic structure of the painting; painting lives in the brushstroke, every stroke becomes light which corresponds to a sensation and, together with the act of painting, through some kind of intuition, sudden but thought through, it’s sometimes soft, and sometimes harsh; a quick stroke, a curl, a dot... strokes that seem to become crazy on the canvas, conveying hints more than descriptions.
Laying the colours of a "free and intelligent" painting on the palette: the white, the yellow, the red and, most of all, the light blue and the browns can reproduce the open space of a landscape.
The pencil, for the malleability, purity and softness of its sharp and gleaming stroke, becomes the favourite technique of the artists in the 1800s. For its lightness and for being easy to use, for the possibility to make the lead tip more or less sharp, for the different tones that the same lead can have on paper, according to the pressure applied and the different paper grains, for the quality of the line drawing, for the possibility to easily erase a stroke with an eraser or to make it lighter, the pencil is the preferable technique to begin the experience of drawing.
The sanguine is mostly used for drawing nudes and for portraits, especially for its warm tone, the luminosity and the soft stroke, which are particularly suitable to reproduce the shapes and the colour of the human figure.
The softness of the matter: the stroke that gets thinner or coarser, the soft and velvety tones, the vivid red and the brown, makes sanguine something more than a simple drawing stick; it’s rather an excellent tool to express shape, light, colour, volume.
It’s important to provide an aesthetic evaluation of the colours according to our way of seeing, of feeling and expressing; besides, it’s exactly from the observation, the analysis, the study of the masters’ works, and their writings, that we get the proof that there are laws and principles that can guide us in our work and serve us as an example to interpret the language of colours of the great painting.