More suited to permanent drawing is the silverpoint, which requires special preparation of the foundation and, once applied, cannot be corrected. Its stroke, also pale gray, oxidizes into brown and adheres unerasably. Silverpoint drawings accordingly require a clearer concept of form and a steady hand because corrections remain visible. Because too much pressure can bring about cracks in the foundation, the strokes must be even; emphases, modelling, and light phenomena must be rendered either by means of dense hachures, repetitions, and blanks or else supplemented by other mediums. Despite these difficulties, silverpoint was much used in the 15th and 16th centuries. Dürer’s notebook on a journey to Holland shows landscapes, portraits, and various objects that interested him drawn in this demanding technique. Silverpoint was much in demand for portrait drawings from the 15th into the 17th century; revived in the 18th-century Romantic era, it was also used by modern artists, most notably Picasso. Graphite point
Toward the end of the 16th century, a new drawing medium was introduced and soon completely displaced metalpoint in sketching and preliminary drawing: the graphite point. Also called Spanish lead after its chief place of origin, this drawing medium was quickly and widely adopted; but because of its soft and smeary consistency it was used for autonomous drawings only by some Dutch painters, and even they employed it mostly in conjunction with other points. (It might be added that the graphite point was originally taken for a metal because its texture shines metallically in slanting light.) The lead pencil, or more properly crayon Conté, became established in art drawing after Nicolas-Jacques Conté invented, around 1790, a manufacturing process similar to that used in the production of artificial chalk. Purified and washed, graphite could henceforth be made with varying admixtures of clay and in any desired degree of hardness. The hard points, with their durable, clear, and thin stroke layers, were especially suited to the purposes of Neoclassicist and Romantic draftsmen. The Germans working in Rome, in particular, took advantage of the chance to sketch rapidly and to reproduce, in one and the same medium, subtle differentiations as well as clear proportions of plasticity and light. Among the most masterful pencil artists of all was Ingres, who presketched systematically in pencil the well-thought-out structure of his paintings.
The more pictorially inclined artists of the late 19th century preferred softer pencils in order to throw into plastic relief certain areas within the drawing. Seurat, on the other hand, reached back to graphite in his drawings from the concert cafés, among them At the Concert Européen, in which he translated the Pointillistic technique (applying dots of colour to a surface so that from a distance they blend together) into the monochrome element of drawing. Pencil frottage (rubbing made on paper laid over a rough surface), first executed by the Surrealist artist Max Ernst, represents a marginal kind of drawing, for here the artist’s hand is no longer the sole creator of forms. Coloured crayons
Coloured crayons, in circulation since the late 19th century, offer all the possibilities of black graphite points; and, in combinations, they attain a stronger colour value than chalks because they do not merge with one another. Every line preserves its original and characteristic colour, a form of independence that Gustav Klimt and Picasso exploited to the full. Incised drawing
A role apart is that played by incised drawings. Their pronounced linearity gives them the visual appearance of other drawings; materially, however, they represent the opposite principle, that of subtracting from a surface rather than adding to it. Incised drawings are among the oldest documents of human activity. In primitive African cultures, the methods and forms of prehistoric bone and rock drawings have survived into the present. In a decorative and conceivably also symbolic form, incised decorations on pottery have existed for thousands of years; insofar as the comparison is valid, they correspond in every formal respect to applied drawings of the same period. A formal equivalent may also be observed in later times: in the decorative details of implements, especially metal—from the drawings on Greek mirrors, through the jewelry made at the end of the Roman Empire, to the scenes on medieval weapons and, above all, on Renaissance dress armour. More often than not these are drawings that follow certain models rather than free drawings in the sense of sketches.
Logically, one would also have to consider all niello work under the heading of drawing, because the picture in this case is cut out of the metal and filled with a deep black-coloured paste so that it appears to the eye as a linear projection on a plane. In like manner, work with the graver or burin (cutting tools) and with the etching needle on the engraving plate may be considered to parallel in its execution that gradual effort applied directly to the carrier that was defined earlier as the art of drawing. The difference lies in the fact that this work is not a goal in itself but the prerequisite for a printing process that is intended to be repetitive. Brush, pen, and dyestuffs
Of the many possibilities of transferring liquid dyestuffs onto a plane, two have become particularly significant for art drawing: brush and pen. To be sure, finger painting, as found in prehistoric cave paintings, has occasionally been practiced since the late Renaissance and increasingly so in more recent times. For drawing as such, however, the method is irrelevant. Similarly, the use of pieces of fur, frayed pieces of wood, bundles of straw, and the like is more significant as a first step toward the camel’s-hair brush than as indication that these objects were ever drawing mediums in their own right. Although it is antedated by the brush, which in some cultures (East Asia, for example) has remained in continued use, the pen has been the favorite writing and drawing tool ever since classical antiquity. Pens
The principle of transferring dyestuffs with the pen has remained virtually unchanged for thousands of years. The capillary effect of the split tip, cut at a slant, applies the drawing fluid to the surface (parchment, papyrus, and, since the late Middle Ages, almost exclusively paper) in amounts varying with the saturation of the pen and the pressure exerted by the drawing hand. The oldest form is that of the reed pen; cut from papyrus plants, sedge, or bamboo, it stores a reservoir of fluid in its hollow interior. Its stroke—characteristically powerful, hard, and occasionally forked as a result of stronger pressure being applied to the split tip—became a popular medium of artistic expression only with the rise of a subjective view of the artist’s personality during the Renaissance. Rembrandt made superb use of the strong, plastic accents of the reed pen, supplementing it as a rule with other pens or brushes. Beginning in the 19th century with the Dutch artist van Gogh, pure reed-pen drawings with a certain forcefulness of expression have been created by many artists. Expressionists such as George Grosz used the reed pen frequently.
If the selection of the reed pen already implies a formal statement of sorts, that of the quill pen opens up a far wider range of possibilities. Ever since the rise of drawing in Western art—that is, since the late Middle Ages—the quill has been the most frequently used instrument for applying liquid mediums to the drawing surface. The importance accorded to this tool is attested by the detailed instructions in painters’ manuals about the fashioning of the pen from wing shafts of geese, swans, and even ravens. The supple tip of the quill, available in varying strengths, permits a relatively wide scale of individual strokes—from soft, thin lines, such as those used in preliminary sketches for illustrations in illuminated books, through waxing and waning lines that allow differentiation within the stroke, to energetic, broad lines. It was only when metal pens began to be made of high-grade steel and in different strengths that they became a drawing implement able to satisfy the demands made by the individual artist’s hand. Inks