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1. The work of the artist Anne Desmet shows how printing can be used with the expressive freedom of collage. Interior Shards, for example, is a wood-engraved print and gold leaf collaged onto ceramic tile. It is made from small cut sections of other engravings combined to create a sense of entering one of the pool areas of the derelict Victoria Baths in Manchester. The paper pieces are collaged on to a rust-red ceramic tile to generate a sense of the color of the brickwork of the interior (sandstone); the fact that the interior is also extensively tiled; and, at the same time, to suggest a sense of the exterior brickwork which has distinctive, decorative, red and white stripes. The fragmentary nature of the collage is also intended to convey a sense of the disrepair of the building that it depicts.
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2. In contrast to craft-based technique, textures and model photographs can be used effectively to create convincing fictive space in digital mixed-media drawings. This image by the architect Janek Ozmin works with model photographs and material textures to develop extraordinary digital collages that represent spaces that are part found in the scale model, part imagined, and part revealed through the process of making the image itself. This kind of sequence of a mixed-media technique is exemplary in the way that it drives the design process forward.
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3a, b. These mixed-media drawings, Interior/ Exterior I and II, formed part of a preliminary study for an architectural project in London. The drawings were made on a wood base that was clad in canvas and layered with gesso. They were initially formed using tissue-paper dressmaking patterns that related to what was to be the eventual program for the project. They were fixed onto the base with rabbit-skin glue. Mid-tones and shadows were formed using diluted bitumen and other materials that related to site studies. Cotton, fabric, tissue paper, and jute gave the drawings a material quality that inspired later stages of the design.