[split] Did the VM go straight from cerebellum to vellum?

[Jorge_Stolfi]

I know a lot of modern creators that would start directly with expensive materials without making a full prototype first

Can you be more specific?  

Oil painters normally sketched their paintings on the canvas with "pencil" before applying their paint.  Sculptors made sketches on paper before putting chisel to marble.  Calligraphy artists make sketches to find the best placement and spacing of letters etc.   Most Medieval manuscripts that survive today were copied by the scribes from other books or drafts.  That must be the case also for documents like decrees, contracts, deeds, etc.

Note that a draft is not a full prototype.  Thus the time spent actually writing the draft (excluding the time spent conceiving its contents -- thinking, doing experiments, reading sources, visiting places etc) is normally only fraction of the time spent scribing it on vellum.   And that time is a good investment, because it is much less than the time that would be wasted by mistakes,  if one wrote directly on vellum.

they know their trade and what they want to do

So are you referring to artisans that make many copies of the same object?  That might be the case of the Alchemists Herbals, maybe.  But even they were probably copied from a master copy, rather than written by the Scribe from memory.   And anyway that example is not relevant to a unique work like the VMS...

The analogy with the laser printer looks like a faulty one. Writing on a computer and then printing on the printer would not take more time and effort than directly sending from the keyboard to the printer. No time or effort is lost by adding the computer.

Of course it takes longer.  The typing time is the same, and then you have to wait for the printer to print it.  But the point is that you write on the computer because you can correct and insert and reorder, while if you were to "type to the printer" you would have to start each page all over after every mistake.

Imagine the VMS Author drawing and writing the text on a Herbal page, directly on vellum, and then realizing that he skipped a whole line of text in the middle of the 1st parag.  Or that he wrote the text for the wrong plant.  If he did that on the draft, no problem -- put an arrow with a note to the Scribe "insert this line here", cross out that sentence overt there, cut the page in half and paste the text onto the correct drawing... 

All the best, --stolfi