Line and Form (1900‪)‬

Could the first profile portrait have been made by a lover tracing his sweetheart’s shadow in charcoal? Walter Crane finds in the old tale a truth about art: a line can give a form its identity.

In these lectures, first delivered at an art school and published in 1900, Crane looks at drawing as both craft and a way of seeing. From the silhouette of a horse against a field to the quiet edges of mountains in evening mist, he shows how much character can survive when detail disappears. For students and artists, the challenge is to make the hand follow the eye—and to choose among progressive construction, flowing calligraphic strokes, tentative guide lines, and the Japanese direct-brush method. How can a single line hold form, movement, texture, and feeling?

With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world.

Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility.