Looking at online images of silverpoint or metalpoint drawings, you will probably notice that many of them look very light and pale. Is this the norm? Why are they so light? And most importantly—how comes that only some metalpoint drawings look so pale while others appear much darker? Different computer monitors display images differently, thus you cannot be certain whether some artwork appears on your monitor the way it was intended to look like by the artist who scanned/photographed their work. Moreover, with image editing software like Photoshop, it is possible to alter how light or dark some digital image looks like. So how do these drawing actually look like in real life?
As usually, it depends. When it comes to art, nothing is ever simple and straightforward. Here’s the problem—silverpoint (or metalpoint) drawings are made by depositing metal particles on specially prepared abrasive surfaces. In general, metals leave lighter marks than graphite or charcoal. Thus you can expect pure metalpoint drawings to be lighter than pencil drawings. Usually. Except that sometimes they aren’t pale at all, and can instead appear very dark, even darker than some pencil drawings.
Some artists use mixed media and combine the metalpoint technique with some other art materials that leave darker marks on the drawing surface. For example, it would be possible to combine silver and charcoal in the same drawing, and such an image would definitely not look pale at all. That being said, I will further focus on pure metalpoint drawings and their visual properties in this article.
Some metals appear lighter or darker than others on the same drawing surface.
In the following picture, you can see one of my test sheets in which various different metals are used on the same drawing surface. Some of them look much darker than others. If an artist uses metals that leave darker marks, then the resulting metalpoint drawing will appear darker. You can read more about that here.
The same metal can appear lighter or darker on different drawing grounds.
Here you can see a comparison between two commercially available silverpoint drawing grounds—“Golden Silverpoint/Drawing Ground” versus “Roberson Silverpoint Drawing Ground.” The difference between both of these drawing grounds lies in the abrasive powders they contain. Golden product is made with titanium dioxide. Roberson product is made with bone ash. The same metals look darker on the Roberson drawing ground. Here I have written more about various drawing grounds and how they determine the appearance of various metals in an artwork.
At this point it should be obvious that some metalpoint drawings will look much paler than others. It depends on how exactly some drawing is made.
In general, old masters had fewer choices in what metals they could draw with, and what abrasive powders they could use for their drawing grounds. For the contemporary artist, the choice is much wider, and it’s not necessary for their drawings to be light and pale. I cannot always know how dark some other artists’ works are, after all, they might be digitally editing their scans/photos in order to increase contrast, but I can at least show how dark my own drawings are.
Here is a scan of one of my metalpoint drawings (made with gold, palladium, and aluminum), this image is straight from the scanner without any edits. Well, I did resize it (I scan my drawings at 1200 dpi) and I also added my watermark, but I didn’t do any other modifications. This image is scanned together with a small reference chart so that you can compare how dark my metalpoint drawing is. The reference chart is drawn on a small piece of regular printer paper. In it I used 5H, 2H, HB, 2B, 5B, 8B, and carbon pencils.
In my opinion, scanners make all drawings (including pencil drawings) appear paler than they really look like in real life. Carbon pencils leave black marks, but on my monitor the small square of the carbon pencil looks grey instead. Thus I think that I should use Photoshop in order to increase contrast and make dark areas of this drawing appear darker, this way it would look closer to how my drawing actually looks like in person.
On my own custom metalpoint drawing grounds, aluminum looks about as dark as a 5B pencil on printer paper. This means that in my drawings shadow areas are dark grey, but not black. If I wanted to further increase the dynamic range of my metalpoint drawings and actually have black shadows, then I would need to use mixed media, for example carbon or charcoal pencils.
Personally, I prefer the look of drawings that have more contrast and do not appear pale. One obvious way how to increase the dynamic range of a metalpoint drawing is to use various different metals. For example, in this horse drawing I used gold for highlights, palladium for midtones, and aluminum for shadows. Op top of that, I also use drawing grounds that have harder abrasive powders with smaller particle size. All metals look darker on such grounds. For example, in my opinion, titanium dioxide is poorly suited for using as an abrasive in a metalpoint drawing ground, because drawings appear very pale on it. Bone ash, on the other hand, is a much better abrasive.