Having tinted your white to the desired tone spread a little of the colour on to your palette and knock your stencil brush on to this colour a few times, so that the brush takes up some of the colour, then begin by gently knocking the brush on to the wood over the cut-out portions until you have completely covered them with colour. Don’t try to do this too quickly. Proceed gently, getting the colour out of your brush by degrees, and take up the colour from the palette in the same gentle manner. The reason for this caution is that if you take up too much colour at a time in your brush and knock it violently on the stencil plate, you will find when you lift up the same that the impression, instead of being sharp will be blobby at the edges through the colour having worked under the stencil. The art of stencilling is in getting sharp, clean impressions, and this can only come of care and taking time. On no account get the colour too thin. It should be of such a consistency as will enable you to knock it out of the brush with slight exertion. If too stodgy thin it with a drop or two of turps and linseed oil, and then mix with palette knife, but on no account get turps into the stencil brush or you will get very bad impressions, for the colour is sure then to run under the stencil. Therefore again I say, don’t hurry. I have said nothing yet as to the tones of colour to be used. This is a matter of taste, and is a most difficult subject to write about. Two artists will use the same colours, and yet one with an eye for colour will give us beautiful harmonies, and the other one wanting this delicacy of perception will give us crudity. Form in your mind some tone of colour suggested, say, by the warm mellow colours of autumn, the soberer russet and greys of the winter, or the light, fresh, delicate tints of spring, and carry these suggestions out in your decoration. The corner cupboard, Fig. 1, we might tint in the russet tones, and you will find that such colours as raw sienna, raw umber, yellow ochre, _terra verte_, burnt sienna, chromes Nos. 1 and 2, Prussian blue, French ultramarine, and light red will supply you with a very varied palette. White tinted with yellow ochre, raw sienna or raw umber are all good tones for stencilling in, and each of them can be mixed or toned with one of the others. The addition of _terra verte_ or Prussian blue will give you soft tones of green. By using such a yellow as ochre to make greens you obtain softer, quieter tones than if you used chromes. Suppose you have small quantities of the above three tints mixed on your palette, you can take a little of one in your brush and knock that out on the stencil, and then a little of the next tint and knock that out, and so on with the third. In this way you get a variety of tints in the stencilled border and yet a certain “tone” will run all through, which gives one a sense of harmony, and at the same time variety, and so lessens the hard mechanical look which stencilling