Studland beach on a beautiful winter’s day. Studland can get extremely busy in the summer but on this sunny (but very cold!) late afternoon in January we almost had it to ourselves.
I drew this in silverpoint and I loved the process very much. It’s all quite new to me. Silverpoint, if you aren’t aware, is quite literally rubbing a silver wire over a surface. It doesn’t work on untreated paper so I used gesso on my usual cartridge paper. The more you go over an area, the darker it gets, but only to a point, so the result is really delicate. Over time, the silver darkens a little more and changes tone slightly and I’m really looking forward to seeing how this picture develops over the coming months.
(Silverpoint is an extremely old technique. The Renaissance masters used silverpoint a lot. Many of the sketches you might have seen by Da Vinci or Michelangelo will have been drawn with silverpoint – pencils weren’t invented when they were alive.)
