From Pencil to Burin. Drawings for Printmaking in Goya's Day

The technical complexity of printmaking entailed a variety of processes of which the starting point was always a drawing – in this case specifically termed a ‘preparatory drawing’. It was sometimes made by the printmaker but was usually commissioned from a draughtsman; that way, the printmaker simply reproduced it faithfully. But before the composition could be engraved or etched, the drawing needed to be transferred to a copper plate. As the design that is incised on the copper plate is reproduced in reverse in the impression on paper, the drawing needed to be laid out facing the opposite direction on the plate. For this purpose, printmakers developed different transfer techniques that preserved the integrity of the drawing, which needed to continue to serve as a model, by making duplicates that we call tracings and counterproofs. 

Preparatory drawings for printmaking evidence the use of most available 18th-century drawing materials and techniques. The media could be dry (black and red chalk) or water based (different inks applied with pen and brush). Which ones the draughtsman chose depended on many factors: whether the drawing was going to be engraved or etched by him or by another printmaker, as well as the subject-matter and the technical printmaking procedure to be used. Drawings in chalk or with a fine brush, with a predominance of contours and hatching, were easily adapted to the linear language of engraving. In contrast, pen drawings, heightened with wash, were better suited to the freer strokes of etching and aquatint. The drawings most highly valued by printmakers were those that provided the greatest amount of information about both figures and lights, and were generally executed in pen, brush and wash.

Drawing was an intermediate step in creating prints of an existing model, be it a painting or any other artistic object, nature itself (from landscape to botanical specimens) or the lives of the kingdom's inhabitants – their daily activities or events worthy of being immortalised. It is essential for the draughtsman to copy and capture the model properly, whether in colour or black and white, so that the printmaker can then reinterpret the drawing in an essentially linear language. Fidelity to the original is the key factor in this process, and only if the forms and colours or tones are accurately defined in the drawing will the expert printmaker be able to translate the original into the language of the graphic medium. Other complementary aspects, such as ornamentation and lettering, also had to be correctly defined in the drawing.