Preparatory sketch for a musical mode (Khambhavati Ragini)

This sketch is a beneath-the-surface view of a painting, which when finished would have looked very similar to the example below. It illustrates one stage in a process in which artists with different levels of skill, experience, and areas of specialization worked together in a workshop and a painting was the result of their collaboration.

This drawing was likely the work of the studio’s master artist, who typically made the big-picture decisions about the painting’s subject, what the main characters would look like, what they’d be doing, and where they would appear on the page. He would also decide the color scheme (here by color names written in black ink) and hand it over to junior artists or color specialists to complete.