In Praeterita Ruskin recalled his lessons with Fielding and how he would:
wash colour smoothly in successive tints, to shade cobalt through pink madder into yellow ochre for skies, to use a scraggy touch for the tops of mountains, to represent calm lakes by broad strips of shade with lines of light between them... to produce dark clouds and rain with twelve or twenty successive washes, and to crumble burnt umber with a dry brush for foliage and foreground. ( Works, 35.215)