Drawings once used primarily as production guides have been showing up in everything from social media to sales materials.
Lorenz Bäumer is convinced that having a special area for sketching in his Paris boutique and hanging original drawings of jewelry designs on its walls has helped distinguish his business from its competitors.
“It’s like coming to an artist’s studio and being there with the artist, instead of being at some giant conglomerate jewelry thing that is on the stock market and has 400 stores,” the designer, 57, said.
For centuries sketches have been part of the creative process, helping designers to sort through ideas and providing guidance for the artisans who fabricate the pieces. But Mr. Bäumer’s decision to highlight drawing is just one example of the many ways that designers have been putting their sketches to work, using them in everything from social media to sales materials to emphasize the artistry and craftsmanship of their endeavors.
At the Bäumer Vendôme boutique, the area that Mr. Bäumer calls la cabane du createur, or the creative shack, is on the ground floor. There, the designer said, he draws “on my own or with some of my clients.”
Sketches on the walls include a scarab brooch and pendant rendered in gouache, a kind of opaque watercolor, on translucent paper. Other framed drawings sit on his desk, where he keeps “a little block of paper on which I’ll sketch,” using black ink pens and colored felt-tip pens that give the designs “the feel with the stones, the color,” he said.
And sometimes, he said, he even will cut out a sketch and have the client model it, “so she gets an impression of what it will look like.”
Mr. Bäumer, who designed jewelry for Chanel and Louis Vuitton before opening his boutique in 2013, said he has given sketches to clients, and even auctioned some. In May 2022, Sotheby’s Paris sold three lots of his preparatory drawings as well as an elaborate gem and diamond bracelet called Île au Trésor (Treasure Island), accompanied by a gouache drawing of the piece.
The Taiwanese designer Anna Hu, 46, has been experimenting with ways to display her mixed media sketches — which are drawn digitally, then printed out and finished with watercolor and colored pencil — to focus attention on her artistry.
For Couture Week in July, she had drawings of 14 new and recent pieces blown up into what she called “micro detail,” then presented them at the Hôtel d’Évreux, on the Place Vendôme. To decorate the entryway of the presentation room, she placed three of the enlarged drawings alongside reproductions of the artworks that had inspired their creation — all on easels, a presentation style she said that she had seen in southern France and liked.
For example, her drawing of a single seashell earring with diamonds, pearls and coral and a seashell brooch was shown alongside Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus,” a depiction of the goddess standing on a giant scallop shell.
Selim Mouzannar, whose sketches show not only each piece’s design, but also the techniques used to set it, has recently been posting some of his drawings on Instagram “to show that everything is done from A to Z in-house,” he said. And, to further emphasize the craftsmanship of his workshop in Beirut, Lebanon, he has featured some of these sketches in video presentations prepared for client events.
His most recent look book, too, included drawings of the intricate metalwork used in his Basilik tsavorite and spinel earrings ($12,860).
Mr. Mouzannar, 60, said he is working on gouache renderings of microscopic looks at the interior of a gemstone, and has reserved a private lounge at the Paris department store Le Bon Marché Rive Gauche from Feb. 29-March 2. (The gouache will be applied by his son, Namir Philippe Mouzannar, who started in the workshop in January).
The designer has been collecting his sketches since 1999, when he founded his namesake business; he estimated he now has some 1,000, organized by collection, in his workshop cupboards.
Bulgari also chose to reinforce the craftsmanship behind the big vibrant stones and designs of its newest high jewelry collection, Mediterranea, by including digital drawings in its videos on TikTok, YouTube and other channels.
Making the most of Instagram multiposts, the jeweler also made a series of three-image slide shows featuring the creations worn by its ambassadors — Zendaya, Anne Hathaway and Lalisa Manobal, best known as Lisa from the K-pop group Blackpink, among others — and ending with digital drawings the brand said were made on a big screen that was worked as if it were a canvas.
Chaumet uses sketches to sell pieces, something it has found eases the transactions, said Ehssan Moazen, 39, the company’s design director. Case in point: He said he was surprised in April to learn that a rough black-ink sketch of a tiara made of wheat ears, along with photographs of the piece being made, prompted a buyer to put down what he called “a hefty deposit” two months before the piece could be ready.
Why would a sketch be so compelling?
“Everybody can draw a little bit, so it’s much more relatable,” he said.
Chaumet’s sketches also have made their way into a book, “Chaumet: Drawing from Nature,” by Gaëlle Rio, published by Thames & Hudson earlier this year.
Among the 298 designs in the book — which span the house’s work from the early 1800s up to the high jewelry collection introduced this summer, Le Jardin de Chaumet — there are tiaras rendered in graphite pencil, gouache and wash (a thin layer of color, usually made with diluted ink) on tinted paper, a pen and black-ink drawing with gold pigment of a peacock corsage brooch, and graphite pencil studies of birds’ feet.
Yet even as designers continue to use pencils, ink, watercolors and gouache, some have been migrating to the Apple pencil, a stylus designed for the iPad.
Eva Zuckerman, 40, co-founder and creative director of the jewelry line Eva Fehren, has been using an iPad and stylus in the last couple of years as “I was able to be much more productive, and I think the feeling of it is so similar at this point to using a pencil that I felt comfortable doing it,” she said.
Now, she says, “I design on airplanes, I design in my room, I design at work. It allows me to be more mobile and versatile.”
Ms. Zuckerman, who is planning to turn some of her geometric sketches into wallpaper, said the versatility of a digital tool has been important “as I’ve got busier and become a mom, sometimes I have to squeeze these precious design moments in.”
And while Mr. Moazen at Chaumet usually draws with a Bic ballpoint pen on paper because “you can make mistakes and you can see them,” he worked directly on a computer for the house’s recent additions to the Bee My Love collection released this past summer, which included a rose gold cuff with 60 brilliant-cut diamonds ($93,650).
“Doing a hexagonal by hand and drawing six surfaces equal and then at right angles and everything, I can do it,” he said, but “it’s just not the most efficient way.”
Even though technology is advancing, many jewelers agree that traditional drawing won’t be erased.
Artificial intelligence, Mr. Mouzannar said, could make the sketching process faster, as “you can see the flaws easier” and modify the results. But, “if you don’t intervene with your hand and your DNA,” the results will too perfect and “without soul,” he said.