silverpoint

A technique used by artists for drawing on paper, popular in the Renaissance, but afterwards superseded by the invention of the graphite pencil. The paper is coated with Chinese white paint and the drawing made with a slim metal point (silver, gold, copper, or lead). Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael made beautiful silverpoint drawings.

Silverpoint predates the use of graphite as a drawing medium and was used by Leonardo da Vinci in his notebooks. A silverpoint drawing can be made with a piece of silver wire held in a lead holder or handmade holder. Some artists simply wrap the wire in a spiral around a pencil with enough length extending over the tip of the pencil to make the drawn line visible to the artist's eyes. The firm paper or lightweight board to draw on needs to be smooth and coated with a thin layer of gouache, poster paint or gesso. The slight tooth made by the layer of paint takes a little of the silver as you move the point over the surface to make the drawing. Cross-hatching is an effective drawing technique for silverpoint. There can be no effective erasure since the wire cuts into the gessoed surface a bit when the lines are drawn, leaving an indentation. To start with the drawing is silvery but over time the silver will tarnish to a rusty black for an old master finish. Rembrandt is known to have made only one silverpoint drawing, a self-portrait with his wife Saskia. By the Eighteenth Century, silverpoint was supplanted by more expressive crayon and chalk drawing, and graphite completely replaced silverpoint as a fine drawing choice by the Nineteenth Century. Silverpoint as an expressive medium has made a renaissance in the 1990's with the resurgence of drawing as an artistic end in itself. contemporary artists can exploit the differences in tarnish with multiple metals to add effects to a drawing.