I did this piece yesterday as an experiment in adding ink and watercolour to silverpoint. Having recently acquired silverpoint drawing materials, I'm enjoying discovering what I can do with them. I ordered my materials from www.silverpointweb.com. There are different options but I used the Golden silverpoint/drawing ground and I stretched 140 pound Arches hot press watercolour paper. The ground is applied to the stretched paper and allowed to dry in between coats for about eight hours (the instructions say overnight but I apply a coat in the morning and a coat at dinner).
I like the silverpoint alone but I couldn't resist the temptation to see what adding other media would do.
At the bottom, I show a photo of just the silverpoint and then a photo of silverpoint with india ink added to the darks. The last photo includes washes of burnt umber, burnt sienna and yellow ochre.
My own conclusion, at the moment anyway, is that I think I'll stick to the silverpoint and work on what I can do with it on its own. It can create some very fine delicate lines and I'd like to work at getting more skilled at creating surface textures. To increase the darks I can add further layers of the silverpoint ground. I have some supports drying right now (on the fifth coat). I may try and go as high as eight coats. The silverpoint drawing here has three coats of ground and I haven't tried a drawing using less.
