design with such
elements both pleasant in effect and well adapted to the work. An
excellent plan would be to cut out all one's forms with knife or
scissors in stiff paper, as a test of the practicability of an inlay
design. This is actually done with the working drawing by the inlay
cutter.

[Illustration (f050): 1. Units of Simple Inlay Pattern; 2. Motive for
Inlaid Pattern Built of the Same Units; 3. Treatment of Form as Pattern
Units for Inlaid Work; 4. Pattern Motive for Inlaid Work]

I once designed an inlaid floor for the centre of a picture gallery.
The scale was rather large, and the work was bold. One kept to large,
bold, and simple forms--water-lilies and broad leaves, swans, scallop
shells, and zigzag borders. Forms which can be readily produced by the
brush would generally answer well for inlay, since they would have
simple and sweeping boundaries and flat silhouette. And for inlay one is
practically designing in black, white, or tinted silhouette. This makes
it very good practice for all designers, both for the invention it tends
to call out, owing to the limited resources and restriction as to forms,
and also as giving facility and readiness in blocking in the masses of
pattern.

The water-colour painter, too, would find that blocking in in flat local
colour all his forms and the colours of his background was an excellent
method of preparatory work, and afforded good practice in direct
painting, since he could add his secondary shades and tints in the same
manner until the work was brought to completion, while preserving that
fresh effect of the undisturbed washes which is the great charm of
water-colour.

[Grouping of Allied Forms]

In seeking forms to group together harmoniously--which is the whole
object of composition--we shall find that much the same kind of
principle holds good whether we are arranging a still-life group or
designing a wall-paper or textile. It is only a difference of degree and
scale. In the one case we are designing in the solid with the actual
objects, before drawing or painting them as a harmonious pictorial
composition; in the other we are arranging forms upon the flat with a
view to harmonious composition with a strictly decorative purpose in
view. In the first we are dealing with concrete form in the round; in
the second, generally speaking, with abstract form in the flat.

[Illustration (f051a): Grouping of Allied Forms