The V&A’s current exhibition, Maharaja: The Spendour of India’s Royal Courts, got me looking around for related design drawings in the collection. I came up with this example made in about 1850, for a portrait of Ram Singh II of Kota – one of the main figures in the exhibition.
What strikes me most about this delicate line drawing is its complete lack of colour. Annotations give a sense of which tints were to be used, but if you compare it to the below (similar) image of Ram Singh, which has its full paint job, and you realize what a leap of imagination was required during the initial outlining.
Here is an even more astounding pairing, dating from the late 1980s – two preparatory sketches for a billboard for a new park in Operto, by the Portuguese graphic designer Joao Machado. On the left is the pencil preparatory study, and on the right, the coloured finished sketch. Machado achieved these vivid contrasts using paper masks and an airbrush, an anticipation of the computer ‘fills’ that have become the norm since. It’s amazing to think that he had this vibrant palette in his head as he was carefully laying out the design. (My thanks to historian Graca Magalhaes for the images and information on Machado.)
How do designers like Machado plan for the huge changes that adding colour will bring to their work? It is one of the most difficult aspects of the preparatory process, because hardly ever do the materials (and hence, the hues) of the sketch correspond to those of the final product.
Designers have come up with many ways to compensate for this problem. One of the most common is to include swatches alongside the drawing. This can be done with lots of different materials, but it is especially common in textiles. Here is one example, a design by Christopher Farr for a carpet to be installed in the British Embassy in Moscow. The rug is drawn in bodycolour, with samples of the handspun dyed wools to be used physically attached to the sheet.
Another option, I suppose, is to make a design that is nothing but colour. Here are two studies for theatrical costumes by the great British designer Oliver Messel: on the left, for the Barber of Seville, and on the right, Le Comte Ory (both operas by Rossini). Each discrete dab of color corresponds to the costume of one character within the company.
The difficulty of approximating the colours of real fabric has been turned into a pretext for free-floating abstraction. Messel has created a self-enclosed world of complementary colours, a palette to inspire himself and his collaborators. For all the rapidity of these offhand sketches, they functioned something like a contemporary fashion designer’s carefully assembled ‘mood board.’ For Messel, getting the colours right wasn’t a problem: it was pure pleasure.