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.

A small show currently on view in the V&A's Architecture Galleries, Europe and English Baroque: English Architecture 1660-1715, got me thinking about cross-sections in design drawings. The display features works by Christopher Wren and other architects of his era. (Those who saw the excellent exhibition Compass and Rule at the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford will see some familiar names - that show will open at the Yale Center for British Art soon.)
 
There are two especially striking examples of cross-sections in the V&A show. First, Christopher Wren's sketches for the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral. On the left is one of the earliest surviving drawings for the building, in which Wren is calculating the curves of three separate parabolic shells. On the right is a modern drawing showing the construction in detail.
 
        
 
Wren's idea was that the dome could hold itself up, thus allowing him to give it extra height. (Filippo Brunelleschi did something similar for the dome at Florence Cathedral, which has two shells.)  
The most spectacular object in the 'English Baroque' show is a model for Easton Neston, a country house designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor that still stands in Northamptonshire. On the left is the model assembled, and on the right, the object exploded into its three elements as shown in the exhibition.
 
    
 
This is a very early survival of an English architectural model. The ingenious multipart construction allowed Hawksmoor to show his client the unconventional layout of the interiors.
 
What I love about these objects is the way they show things that are impossible to see in real life. Not until the advent of X-rays in the 1890s did it become possible to see through objects. But this is exactly the effect that Wren, Hawksmoor and other architects achieved in these 17th-century preparatory designs.
 
Below is another example by William Chambers, best known for his design of Somerset House. This drawing dates from the 1770s and is an unrealized design for a church near Oxford Street. I like the combination of real and unreal in the drawing, with shading used to define the interior volumes, the timber frame construction for the dome, but also a surreal pink used to signal where a wall is being seen in cross-section.
 

 
More recent cross-section drawings show how architects and designers continue to rely on this 'impossible' view to specify the most functional concerns about a design. Computer Aided Design (CAD) has made this leap of imagination more precise than ever, so that a cross-section can be a virtual reality version of the object. Here for example is a drawing of the London City Hall by Norman Foster's architectural firm, showing various environmental measures that were built into the structure - including pipes that pull cold groundwater up into the building to cool it.
 

 

To the left is a CAD concept drawing for a 'mould blown' plastic refrigerator, by the designer Roberto Pezzetta for the Italian manufacturer Zanussi. By pairing the exterior view of the fridge with cutaways, Pezzetta subtly implies a link between the object's sensuous, fluid surface and the functional details of its interior design - as in the curvilinear shell that slides down to cover a vegetable drawer at the bottom.
 
There is something truly seductive about cross sections. Though they are among the most functional and informative of design drawings, they also give us the sense of seeing into the designer's mind, as if we were literally inside the process. Perhaps this is why the British jeweller Vicky Ambery-Smith chooses to use cross-section views in her architecturally-inspired work. Below is her own take on St. Paul's Cathedral. The brooch (you can see a similar one on view in the V&A's jewellery galleries) is only about 5cm high, but it seems to be a whole world that we can enter in our imaginations.
 
           
 
 
 
 
 
 

One of the fascinating things about design drawings, at least to me, is that you often can’t tell whether they are for presentation, for working out a design concept, or just recording an object once it’s finished. Sometimes, perhaps, there is a bit of all three going on. The confusion really sets in when you see aesthetic touches on what you would otherwise expect to be a ‘working sketch.’ For whose benefit has the drawing been prettied up? Maybe the draftsman was taking pride in the work. Maybe there was an internal politics in play, where the designer wants the boss, or even the executor of the object, to take the job seriously. Maybe the drawing would be shown to a private client or retailer, as well as being used internally. As I said, it’s confusing.
 
 
These thoughts were prompted recently by a group of drawings for silver that are held within the Edward Barnard & Sons archive. Most of the archive was recently donated to the V&A’s Archive of Art and Design by Barnards' parent company, Padgett and Braham. It’s an extraordinary body of material, recording the firm's work in detail throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries - although it traces its origins back to c.1680. (Incidentally, you can see other design drawings for metalwork in the Silver Galleries at the V&A).
 
 

 
In addition, the archive includes business ledgers, glass negative photos, pattern books (including some 19th and even 18th century ones that the company collected for design inspiration), and lots and lots of parts that could be used for casting. The drawers full of handles, spouts, and other bits and pieces of teapots, sugar bowls and who knows what else are like a Deconstructivist’s junk shop.
 
 

 
Most of the drawings in the Barnard archive seem to be quite utilitarian. They capture profiles, and sometimes show multiple sizes of a single design layered on one sheet.
 
 
    
 
The shop used its drawings to capture lots of information, including dates (sometimes more than one, presumably each time the piece had gone into production), dimensions, the names of clients, and also symbols that linked the drawing to boxes of patterns.
 
When going through such a large body of apparently workaday material, it was a real surprise to find a few drawings of a more artistic nature. They aren’t exactly still life paintings, but for some reason, the draftsmen at the firm sometimes went to the trouble of rendering the reflective surface of the metal objects. Here are a couple of examples: an art deco sweet dish from the 1930s, and a low tray, probably in silver-gilt.
 
 
     
 
In the dish on the left, in particular, the draftsman even added a touch of blue to give a convincing effect of silver. More research about the Barnard archive is definitely called for (the museum needs to get the huge body of material organized first), but I think these drawings were doing double-duty. They suggest direct communication with a prospective client, whom Barnard & Sons were probably trying to impress with a shiny surface, but also were used in-house to work up and/or record the design.
 
One last fascinating drawing from the archive dates to the shop’s final year. In this case we know the date precisely, because what was kept was not the original but a fax, sent on 13 November, 1990. This must have been one of the very last objects made by the firm, and it shows that Barnard & Sons had turned to ‘outsourcing.’ It was sent by the firm to a certain Bernie, who would ‘spin’ the main elements of the vase - that is, form sheet metal over a wooden profile using a lathe. (See this video for footage of this process in action.) The drawing is wonderfully specific about the making process, noting that the spun elements would be joined together with a cast knop between the foot and the body, and that ‘fancy wire’ would be added near the rim.
 
Of course smiths have relied on 'outsourcing' for centuries - making silver, like many other traditional crafts, was a specialized trade that lent itself well to the division of labor long before factory production was the norm. But this fax still seems eloquent to me of the decline of the silver industry. By 1990, Barnard & Sons had gone from being one of London’s leading decorative art manufacturers to a very small operation. In general, the twentieth century wasn’t kind to silversmiths. Their key sales items were formal dining and commemorative pieces, both of which went way out of fashion after World War II and haven't come back in since. Most craftspeople still working in the medium are either ‘studio artists,’ working alone and often employed in teaching; or reproduction makers who don’t do much in the way of new designs. That so much expertise and history went by the wayside so recently is a bit heartbreaking. But thanks to the preservation of this archive, we can at least get some sense of this firm, and how it went about bringing a bit of a shine to the British home for almost two centuries.
 
 
 
 

Here's a pop quiz for you. When was this chair designed?
 

 
If you guessed 'last year,' I don't blame you. It's got a fashion-forward pinkness about it, and the combination of circle, curve and triangular wedge has the minimal snap of the latest out of Milan. Or perhaps you went for '1981'? I wouldn't blame you. The chair does look pretty postmodern, and even bears a passing resemblance to Peter Shire's iconic 'Bel Air' chair of that year - here shown with a preparatory study that we have in the V&A collection.
 
           
 
Both the mystery chair and Shire's Postmodern design have similarly disjunctive compositions, with curved, angular and round shapes smashed together. They are like almost-accidental masterpieces.
 
But no. The pink chair was designed way back in 1968, and by someone you may never have heard of, unless you are an insider in British design circles. Her name is Jane Dillon. Here's a picture of her, sitting in one of her other chairs from the late '60s.
 

 
Back then she was going by her maiden name of Jane Young, and young she was, too: a recent graduate of the Royal College of Art, in her mid-twenties. She found her way to the Milan studio of Ettore Sottsass, the famous Italian designer. For the most part she worked on colour studies for a line of office furniture he was doing at the time for Olivetti. But she also worked out some absolutely amazing chair designs. 
 
Dillon has just given the Archive of Art and Design at the V&A some precious archival materials, including the pictures I've included in this blog post, and also some of the preparatory sketches for the chairs. Here are one of the earliest development drawings - with a tentative title of 'T-Time,' a reference to the idea of including an integral table in the design - and a geometric  study showing the plan of the chair (as if viewed from above).
 
        
 
And here's another motion study, a quick sketch in red pen.The two vignettes at lower left again show the chair in use from above. The idea being shown is that as the sitter shifts her weight from side to side, the seat beneath her (and the other elements of the chair) will move on a swivel joint.
 

 
As stylish as the chair looks today, from Dillon's perspective it was mainly an exercise in dynamic ergonomics.  The motion study above indicates this, but it's clearer still in the final preparatory drawing below, which shows how three of the chair's four parts swivel in coordination according to the user's shifting posture. She thought of it as a functionalist experiment, more late Bauhaus or Gerrit Rietveld than Pop or Postmodern.
 

 
You'll notice that like many designers, Dillon does many types of drawing depending on what she was thinking about. As she put it to me in a recent interview, "my drawings very much reflect my mental state."
 
The chair was put into limited production by a company called Planula - Sottsass made the connection for her - and was produced in several variations of shape and colour, including the green version at right, as well as a version in white leather and gold, of which 12 were purchased by a man that Dillon remembers as a "sheik." It was received well by the design community (Joe Columbo saw and liked it, and it was reproduced in the magazine Domus).  In 1972 the chair was nearly included in an important exhibition about Italian design at the Museum of Modern Art called 'The New Domestic Landscape'. Unfortunately the curators decided Dillon didn't count as Italian. Unfortunately again, in that same year she came down with an illness and came back to Britain to recover with her new husband Charles. The chair never went into wide production, but Dillon kept going. She designed for Habitat, Herman Miller, and Cassina. She went back to the Royal College of Art to teach, and formed a partnership with Peter Wheeler and Floris van den Broecke. More recently, she has teamed up with designer Tom Grieves to create some innovative environmentally sustainable furniture. Keeping up to date today seems to be more important to her than having been ahead of the curve in 1968; still, she's able to marvel at what she came up with back then. "It's the most amazing kind of object. Only when it's in use does it become a new kind of chair."
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
The last time I blogged about an exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery, it was after the show had already closed. Not this time! Beyond Bloomsbury, an exhibition about the designs and decorative arts of the Omega Workshops, will be on view until 20 September, 2009. So there's plenty of time to catch these early examples of British modernism. Many objects are borrowed from the V&A, but (as is often the case when you work for a really large museum) I'd never had the chance to see them before.
 
The Omega Workshops (founded in 1913) are often criticized as a hothouse environment, lacking the radical social vision of the Russian Constructivists (see my previous post Russian Arc) or the Bauhaus. But as the historian Christopher Reed shows in his brilliant book Bloomsbury Rooms, this was one moment where life and artistic ideals were intermingled in many and complicated ways. Under the leadership of art critic Roger Fry - one of the first British observers to really understand the Postimpressionist art then being made in Paris - a group of painters and sculptors including Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell played at design. Their objective was to create a truly 'non-traditional' domstic interior, complete with textiles, ceramics, furniture, and other wares. Their aesthetic was basically expressionist. So the key objective for the Omega designers was to retain the freshness of touch that they could achieve in a handpainted object like the Japanese-style screen to the left, with its obvious indebtedness to Matisse. Notice in the detail of the screen below how they painted over the sides of the panels, and right across the hinges.
 

 
How to retain this sense of immediacy in a design for production, though? Textiles are a particularly interesting problem, because their grid-based construction of interwoven warp and weft threads lends itself to rectilinear designs but not to wild gestural composition. It's almost funny to see the free-spirited Omega designers trying to use graph paper when planning out their textiles. Here's an Omega drawing for a rug and a detail - notice how the blue line just wanders aimlessly off the grid.
 
      
 
As Alexandra Gerstein puts it in the excellent catalogue for the Courtauld show, this drawing 'could not have been of practical use to a carpet-maker; the grid would have simply provided a framework or matrix for working out abstract designs and proportions.'
 
One obvious way to escape the grid in a textile is to paint or print the image on to the cloth, rather than weave it in. One example of this approach in the show was Vanessa White's printed linen 'White,' which features blotches of colour scattered willfully across the surface, in no consistent relation to the overprinted linear design (which itself has a hand-drawn quality, thanks to the use of a stencil technique). In the detail to the left, a stray, tiny drop of red testifies to the speed with which the textile was created. But it's in a woven textile like a carpet that you can really get a sense of Omega's complicated relationship to the grid - which was, for them, both a geometric structure in which to play, and a constraint on the expressionist gesture. The African-influenced carpet design at right was created by Duncan Grant for the Ideal Home Exhibition held at Olympia in 1913. It shows only one-fourth of the whole pattern (on the same principle discussed in my blog post Game of Two Halves, it was replicated for each corner of the final carpet). For the manufacturer of the carpet,  it presented an obvious problem: how do you weave a textile that has the brushy quality of the black lines and hatch-marks in the drawing, which give it so much life and energy? The ingenious answer arrived at by Grant in conjuncton with the weavers at the Royal Wilton Carpet Factory (who probably made the carpet) is visible in the details below of the drawing and the finshed rug. As you can see, the draftsmanship of the sketch is conveyed in the textile through a series of 'steps' in each black woven line. As Fry wrote of the (unidentified) weaver, 'he has taken a theme of almost daring simplicity, but not relying only on the broken quality of the knotted surface of the rug, he has deliberately broken his rectilinear by small steps up and down; he has also made his shading sometimes perpendicular and sometimes diagonal.'
 
    
 
Though this solution depended almost entirely on the judgment of the manufacturer, the carpet nonetheless realized Fry's stated goal of 'substituting wherever possible the directly expressive quality of the artist's handling for the deadness of mechanical reproduction.' It's a great example of how the passage from sketch to product, and from one set of hands to another, can be the occasion for avant garde experiment.
 
    
 
 

The following is our first student 'guest post,' submitted by Ann Christie ... enjoy!
 

I’m one of the students on the MA in History of Design at the V&A/RCA and just starting to research textile production at the turn of the twentieth century for the dissertation next year. One of the sources for this research is the pattern books which survive in the archives of many textile manufacturers.

Before I started research I imagined pattern books would generally equate to the manufacturers’ books of swatches a customer today can use to view a range of available fabrics. But in fact they serve a whole range of purposes from this interface with the customer, to the firm’s internal records of orders, to notebooks with samples of other manufacturers’ fabrics used to analyse the weave or estimate the costs of production. It’s fascinating how many different ways there are to record this visual and technical information.
 
   
 
These huge early twentieth century books of Courtaulds in the V&A’s Archive of Art and Design at Blythe House are literally sample books, with large swatches of fabrics woven as prototypes to test specified designs and yarns for internal departments or outside customers. Other information, such as the weave instructions, or results of the tests with recommendations, is often stuck into the same page alongside the sample:
 

The nice thing at this early stage of research is that in the interests of gathering context it seems quite justified to ramble about picking up and turning over possibly useful bits of background information. I came across five turn-of-the-century books from one of the companies Courtaulds acquired, J.W and C. Ward, which (though probably nothing to do with my research) are enticingly listed as ‘containing small photographs of curtains and furnishing fabric designs’. Among various methods of recording patterns - from the swatch itself to diagrams to the technical languages of weave analysis - it’s the first time I’d seen photographs mentioned. So it became a brief and intriguing diversion into the history of industrial photography.

What these books seem to be is a reference list of patterns, numbered consecutively and mostly with a very brief description such as ‘tapestry curtain’. Notes occasionally suggest markets – the UK, the US, the world – or that the design has been withdrawn. Only very occasionally are the patterns recorded with a swatch of the fabric itself, otherwise by pen and ink drawings or by tiny photographs. Some of these are cyanotype prints – the iron-salts process which makes a permanent image of startling Prussian blue, as in the image below left.
 
     
 
I thought at first these might have been taken as a photogram directly from the fabric, but the scale would be useless for the purposes of the records in this little book. So they would have to be contact printed from negatives, as is clear from those which show the draping of the fabric (above right).
 
The rest are (I presume) gelatine-silver prints in tones of warm brown to cool blacks, and they range, like the cyanotypes, from intimations of the materiality of the fabric – its texture and 3-dimensionality – to photographs of designs where the object photographed is a sketch on squared paper:
 
   
 
So what’s going on here? Is there some sort of hierarchy of authenticity which, largely dismissing the real fabric as impractically bulky for this purpose, takes the photograph as the next best thing?
 
The image (above right) of the photograph pasted over a coloured drawing - on the face of it a better and clearer record - suggests that might be happening...  Is a photograph seen as evidence of ownership of the design? Or is it something to do with skill and time, that the job of drawing, and to scale, designs for record purposes would take those draughtsmen away from other work, whereas the photography could be done (sometimes conspicuously badly, as in the image to the left) by anyone with an interest and access to basic photographic equipment? Certainly the lack of uniformity in the photographs suggests they weren’t commissioned professionally, and not done as a retrospective project but over time. Could one of the senior members of the firm have had a particular enthusiasm for photography?
A clue to this might just be in one of the designs. Among the huge variety of designs – intricately patterned, geometric, art-nouveau-ish, only a few have any hint of the provenance of the design itself. There is a nice note on one example referring to the inspiration of a fifteenth century painting.

 
Some of the later ones list the designer, among them prominent names such as Harry Napper and the Silver Studio; one is labelled Dresser – presumably Christopher, though dated four years after his death. But one odd image of dark organic blobs is titled ‘Photoplastic Protoplasm’ which suggests how photomicrography and X-rays were revealing structures and patterns in nature with the potential for translation into design:
 
 

 
Jennifer Tucker’s book Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science gives a great account of popular as well as scientific interest in bacteria, for example, through the role of photography in contemporary publications.
 
So I wonder if there was a personal interest here in what photography can do for production; not just as a way of recording but as a tool for design.

 
Last week I took my students from the V&A/Royal College of Art course in the History of Design to Westfield Shopping Centre, the mega-mall that was finished in Shepherd's Bush in west London last year. We were toured by the head project architect, Patrick Vantomme, as well as Paul Sutliff, the director of retail designers Callison Europe. Paul was an architect for Bluewater Shopping Centre, another fixture on the London shopping scene.
 
I'm not sure what you think about shopping malls - come to think of it, I'm not sure what I think of shopping malls. But there's no doubt they are fascinating from a design point of view. The main challenge for a shopping centre's designer, apart from creating a prosperous and stylish look, is to maximize what Paul Sutliff calls "dwell time." There's not much the architects can do to make each store's products more desirable. But they can try to prolong the average visitor's stay in the mall, which tends to increase the amount of money spent. There are a few simple tricks to achieve this: no clocks; no windows; lots of daylight; spaces that are clear enough to navigate, but complicated enough to keep shoppers from getting bored.
 
Here is a first-floor plan for Westfield, in which you can see several of the solutions that Patrick and his colleagues devised for the mall.
 

 
It's quite a complicated drawing, but a few features stand out. First, the overall shape - like a giant squared-off Figure 8. The first suburban shopping centres, like Northgate Mall in Seattle (1950), were one-storey buildings laid out in a straight linear plan, with a large store at each end acting as anchors. )Paul and Patrick called these "dumbbell" plans.) The problem is that once you walk down the mall, you may not feel like walking back - and even if you do, you certainly won't take a third or fourth pass. At Westfield though, there are two levels, and the complicated layout encourages you to make endless circuits through the building. This is also true at Bluewater; the V&A owns a model of the building, and you can see its triangular structure quite clearly, with a big anchor store located at each corner.

 
If you look back at the Westfield drawing, you'll see that there are ovals cut into the walkways. These allow you to see down to the ground floor, getting glimpses of other stores. They also visually lighten the place. And you'll also notice an irregular bit in the plan at the lower right. This is the Village, a high-end shopping area with stores like Prada and Louis Vuitton vying for the luxury shopper's attention. Here is a concept drawing for this part of the mall, and the space as built.
 
    
 
This is one case where the frictionless quality of the computer rendering is translated faithfully into concrete and glass. It's a style that prompted architectural critic Iain Sinclair to describe the mall as a "a sleek, committee-designed hangar [that] looks like a vanity-project swimming pool." But there is a practical logic behind the design. A mall operator doesn't want to distract from the (often very strong) design identities of the individual brands arrayed along the walkways. And as Patrick notes, a retail architect's job is just beginning when the building opens. Stores come and go, and the need to keep things looking constantly new requires a framework that imposes as little as possible on future additions. The roof at Westfield has a lot of character, because it has to keep looking interesting for decades. But most of the other elements have to be simple and flexible. The building is completely designed around the capitalist principle of creative destruction.

A final, and to me fascinating, point about mall design is that stores pay different amounts for different kinds of space. The square footage closest to the foot traffic costs the most. Once you get 5 meters into the store, though, the price per square foot starts falling, and keeps falling as you get further back away from the front display windows. This allows luxury brands like Beaverbrooks jewellers, at left, to have small, expensive boutiques, while larger stores can have extensive floor space and storage in the back to keep excess stock. Restaurants and other amenities pay less per square foot than stores (because they increase "dwell time"), and the huge anchor stores pay very little. They are there to act as the big draws for the little shops along the mall, which in turn subsidize the larger stores by paying relatively higher rents.
 
As many people have noted, the timing of Westfield's opening couldn't have been worse, given the recent economic downturn. But that's not bad planning, it's bad luck: the project has been on the books for over a decade (it began before the last recession had even started). Today there are a few store spaces that are unrented, easily recognized at the mall because they are filled with shallow window displays.The luxury outlets in the Village particularly are feeling the pinch. Like it or not, though, Westfield is here to stay.
 
One last point, which gets to the heart of mall design as a process. Places like Westfield have a reputation for being manipulative and unreal: triumphs of spectacle over substance. But from the perspective of their creators, they are supremely practical concerns. Patrick spent a lot of his time with us describing his interactions with builders and craftsmen. "Let's say you want to build a concrete form, " he said. "Drawing it couldn't be easier. You make a shape, and fill it with dots to show it's concrete. But then you actually see the guys pour the form, you learn about the process. And then you have to explain to them why they have to take it down and rebuild it eleven feet to the left because the design has changed." The retail business is an endless process of negotiation - between the mall operator, the individual stores, the contractors, and ultimately the consumers. In this system of exchange, design is the ultimate go-between.

 

 
Before the age of photocopiers and scanners, how did you make a copy of an image? In a sense, you didn't - prior to photography there was no means to make an exact replica of a drawing. This doesn't mean there wasn't a lot of copying done, though, and many techniques were developed to improve on the results you could get by replicating an image freehand. Tracing through a translucent sheet is one obvious example; another is the technique of pricking. This is as simple as it sounds: you take a pin - which, by the way, was a staggeringly common thing in the days before zippers and staplers, because that was how you kept your clothing on and your documents together - and make tiny holes along the main lines of the design.
 
It's often difficult to see pricking unless you are looking closely, but here is a drawing from the collection of the Soane Museum where you can see the holes quite clearly.
 

 
It was originally drawn in the 1690s by Nicholas Hawksmoor as a scheme for the royal hospital in Greenwich, and altered several times as he kept working on the plans. The pricking is probably for transferring the drawing on to a plate so that an engraving could be made.
 
Once the holes were put into the paper, the image was "pounced," meaning that a coloured powder was sprinkled over it. The pounce would sift through the pinholes, making the redrawing of the image as simple as connect-the-dots. This is a technique used often in embroidery as well as sketching. Here is a purpose-made pounce bowl, probably made in the seventeenth century. You can see that the bottom is fitted out with a pierced copper plate that let the powder through. (Pounce was also used to dry ink on written documents.)
 

 
Pricking is used in some surprising contexts. For example, ink painting in China and Japan has a reputation for being very quick and instinctive. What we tend to appreciate in such a painting is the brushwork. Yet Asian painters relied extensively on models (called fanban in Chinese, funpon in Japanese) which they copied, both as a way of learning the skills of painting and in order to "mass-produce" images that were particularly popular. Sometimes the model was pricked and pounced, transferring the image to a new sheet of paper or silk, and then the painting was made using the dots as a guide.  (A great book on this subject was recently published, entitled "Copying the Master and Stealing His Secrets.") At left, below, is a funpon inspired by a famous painting entitled "Hawks and Pines" by the 16th century painter Sesson.
 
            
 
While the funpon is valuable mainly as a document of professional painting practice, the original (on the right) is an Important Cultural Property in the collection of the Tokyo National Museum.
 
The best pricked image I have ever seen is right here in the V&A: a "drawing" consisting entirely of pricked lines. It's actually a reversal of the usual routine. For this image, probably made by an amateur as a domestic accomplishment, an outline was made using a pencil and then the detail was done with a pin. Hope she had a thimble handy.
 

Clay is not usually thought of as a sketching medium. In fact, ceramics are the ultimate in delayed gratification: you make the pot, then wait for it to dry, then fire it in a kiln. Only once you open up the kiln do you really know what you've done.
 
But there's at least one way for a potter to sketch: by using slip. It's not a very complicated material - just clay mixed with water, to about the consistency of heavy cream. But you can do wonders with it. My friend, the terrifically talented potter Michelle Erickson, pointed out to me after reading my post below on "drawing a line and following it," that this is exactly what you do when making slipware. Here's an eighteenth-century plate in the V&A, made by dripping lines of light-coloured slip in rows over a layer of dark-coloured slip, and then dragging a tool (maybe a comb or feather) across the surface.
 

 
For the purposes of this blog, though, the most important thing about slip is that you can draw with it. Traditionally this was done using a clay pot with a quill sticking out of it as a  pouring spout, but here is Michelle using a more modern squeeze bottle technique.
 

 
For more great images like this, check out the article that Michelle and ceramic historian Rob Hunter wrote about all the marvelous things you can do with slipware. The medium has a freshness to it that no other type of ceramic can match. As you can see from the below plate, now in the Chipstone Foundation collection in Milwaukee (where I used to work) sketching in clay has always brought out the inventiveness in potters. 17th-century potter Ralph Simpson's truly weird take on a game of cat and mouse wouldn't have been quite the same in any other medium.
 

 
You still have to fire a pot like this, of course. In fact, you can tell that the iron in the dark slip that Simpson used ran a little bit when the glaze was heated to the melted point. That's the sort of effect the people who love ceramics, like me, really go for. As is the feeling that you can follow every little decision, every swoop of the quill with which Simpson dripped his slip, all these centuries later. The magic of slipware, at least for me, is the way it fuses the quickest of sketches and the most permanent of materials into a single, arresting form. And you can eat off it too!

The recent Tate Modern exhibition of Alexandr Rodchenko and Liubov Popova got me thinking about drawing as a tool of avant garde design. These two Russian artists made the leap from painting to "productivism" in the wake of the Revolution. Autonomous works of art - paintings to hang on the wall - just didn't cut it as instruments of political radicalism. What they were after was a penetration of their ideals into everyday life, and they hoped to do this through design: clothing, ceramics, architecture. As Christina Kaier notes in her wonderful book on the subject, Imagine No Possessions, objects were now to act as "comrades" in the struggle for a socialist and democratic state. Of course, it didn't work out that way: the Constructivist avant garde was crushed in the 1930s as Socialist Realism became the house style of the state. But the drawings in the Tate exhibition showed how artists like Rodchenko and  Popova tried to put their principles into practice.
 
What I found interesting about this narrative arc was that their early paintings looked handcrafted, but their later designs have an austere geometric quality that would be difficult, if not impossible, to reproduce in a three-dimensional object. Here is a 1917 panel painting by Rodchenko:
 
 
 
Ironically, the leap to abstraction exposes the very concrete methods by which the painting is put together. You can get a detailed sense of his working process, with scored layout lines (made using a rule and compass), strong silhouettes achieved using hand-cut masquing stencils, and a variety of textures achieved with a palette knife or by applying paint mixed with sand. The conventional artistic technique of shading a profile at the edge, to create a sense of volume, is divorced from representation, so it seems like just one more material "effect."  In Popova's work, there's a similar interest in this sort of thing; she even mixed wood dust into her pigments before applying them to plywood, as in this 1921 painting:
 
 
 
Both artists were already interested in design at this time. Rodchenko's 1917 drawings for lamps to be used in the Café Pittoresque in Moscow show him trying to apply his abstract language to the creation of 3D objects.
 
          
 
You can feel the tension here between the logic of Constructivist painting and the requirements of design. You'd have a hard time building lamps based on these drawings alone - their topology seems sort of magical, like that of a Mobius strip. Shading is back to its usual role of indicating three-dimensionality, but that is the only concession to real space.
 
As Rodchenko and Popova gave up on fine art formats and entered their Productivist phase, this conflict between abstract ideals and manufactured objects becomes more and more evident. Their drawings are very eloquent in this respect. Both artists came to de-emphasize the physicality of their designs as much as possible. Here for example are a 1922 design for a cup and saucer by Rodchenko, and a 1923 costume design by Popova:
 
       
 
In both drawings, there is hardly any sense of the volume of the object, much less the way it will sit in the hand or drape over the body. Notice for example the development of the teacup base using a perfect triangle that, in actuality, would curve up the side of the form; or Popova's use of similar equilateral triangles to join the legs of her design, which would be distorted if the outfit were worn. And unlike their paintings from about five years earlier, the drawings themselves are made to look as uninflected as possible, like they were produced automatically. Partly this was to imply that their approach to design was egalitarian. Their own skill in rendering the object was beside the point; it could only detract from the democratic re-invention of everyday life.
 
Yet both artists seem to have struggled with this tension between an ideal, unachievable form and the qualities of real, crafted objects. Here are two more of their costume designs from this period - a threatrical costume by Rodchenko on the left, a dress made from custom-printed fabric by Popova on the right.
 
                    
 
I'm fascinated by the attempt to integrate a pure language of abstraction (the red square in the Rodchenko, especially) with such true-to-life details as the bunching of fabric. It's as if they are trying to persuade you that perfection  really can enter your life, if only you give it a chance.