Jewellery gouache rendering and paint-ups

A paint-up is a rendering in gouache, an opaque watercolour, usually on toned or grey paper. The paper gives the middle value, and the painter builds metal and stones up from it: darker washes for shadow, opaque white for the highlights, placed where light actually sits on polished gold or along a facet edge. Done well, a paint-up reads as an object lying on the table rather than as a diagram.

The convention is old. Fine jewellery houses have presented designs this way for generations, and the trade still reads a paint-up at a glance: a buyer, an editor or a client knows what they are looking at. It is also the truest picture of colour a design can have before the stones are in hand, because the painter mixes the colour named in the brief.

A painted rendering is what a collection is sold from while the metal is still being cut, and what a client is shown when a commission is being agreed. In practice one painting does several jobs:

• Buyer presentations: the collection shown whole and at scale, before samples exist.
• Press and editorial: an image an editor can run ahead of a launch, or beside the finished piece.
• Lookbooks and line sheets: the painting placed where a photograph will follow, or kept as the image of record.
• Approvals before CAD: proportion, colour and stone layout agreed while a change costs a brushstroke.
• Commissions: a piece shown to its client before anyone commits to the stone or the metal.

A paint-up is only as exact as its brief. The more of the piece is decided, the less is left to the painter’s judgement, and the closer the painting comes to what the workshop will make.

• Sketches at any finish: a pencil line on scrap paper is enough to start from.
• Dimensions, or the size the piece should read at, and the finger, wrist or neck size it is drawn for.
• The metal and its colour: yellow, white or rose gold, platinum, silver, or an alternative material.
• The stones: species, colour, cut, size and how each is set, or photographs of the stones themselves.
• The views you need: front, side, top, or the piece as worn.
• What the painting is for: a buyer meeting, a press release, a lookbook spread or a client approval.

A paint-up and a CAD model answer different questions. The painting fixes intent: how the piece should look, how large the stone should feel, which tone of gold sits against which colour. The CAD model fixes construction: wall thicknesses, seat depths, how the piece is cast and set. Painting first is usually the cheaper order, because a proportion that is wrong on paper is changed in an afternoon rather than remodelled.

At Gemlea the two sit in the same studio. A paint-up a brand has approved goes on to a technical drawing, in plan and section with the tolerances a setter needs, and then to CAD, so the model is checked against a painting the brand has already signed off.

A render made from a CAD model shows exactly what the file is, which is its strength as a check before casting and as a product image. A gouache rendering shows what the piece is meant to be, with the softness of something seen by eye. Many brands use both: paintings to sell a collection in and to show the press, renders once the models are final. Which comes first depends on whether the design is still moving.