I always get my presents early, and this year, my husband bought me this 24K gold stylus for metalpoint drawings. The paper is a clay-coated paper from silverpointweb.com. I don’t know if it’s any particular brand. It picks up marks from pretty much everything but appears to erase well, thank goodness.
I’m looking forward to using gold on different surfaces. It looks like a warm gray but has a gold reflection when the light hits it just right.
I snapped several pictures of this robin by the edge of a river, but the finished drawing looks rather otherworldly as though a robin would never be in that location. Metalpoint gives everything an otherworldly feeling.
It’s hard to photograph metalpoint as it reflects light. On the drawing above, I used a fiberglass stylus to erase highlights.
I challenged myself to use an art supply I already had instead of buying something new, so I dug out the metalpoint kit I’ve rarely used. Metal needs a surface to grab onto, so I experimented with a Gessobord for the dove. It worked really well—a bit bumpy, but the darks were darker than I thought they’d be. In the end, though, I think it looks like a graphite drawing, and it didn’t capture the soft, dreamy quality of metalpoint drawings.
I tried a new surface for the Saw Whet Owl. It’s called Legion Art Coated Cover. I bought it through Acuity Papers, and I have to say, it’s the all-time best and most careful packaging I’ve seen. The 20 sheets (three different paper types) were wrapped, labeled, and boxed with cardboard buffers around the edges. Honestly, I marveled at the care taken the entire time I opened the package, and here I am writing about it days later.
This paper is silky smooth. It’s coated with clay. I really liked the end result, even though I know I’ll be stuck in the high key value range. It looks like metalpoint, and the shine is truly awesome.
I learned a lesson about the Legion paper, though. Erasing it will leave a smooth spot that will be nearly impossible to cover up. This shouldn’t have been a surprise because metalpoint is known for being difficult to erase. I hadn’t planned a background, but I added one after realizing that there was no way to fix a number of small erased areas in the white space surrounding the owl. Live and learn. The spots ended up creating interesting splotches in the branches and tree trunks.
