Leonardo da Vinci's Drawing Materials

[Music] Leonardo da Vinci produced many hundreds of drawings during his life many of them of extreme beauty and complexity and it's incredible to think that he producing using these very simple ingredients he would have learnt how to draw using a silver point on a wooden tablet now silver won't draw directly on a wooden tablet so what artists used to do was to get some bone ash and mix it with saliva and rub it onto the tablet so when dry this bone preparation can just simply be drawn on with the silver point and then when you finished and you want to do something else wait finger and you can erase it all now one of the problems with trying to use silver point on paper is that it doesn't write on paper that's because the paper isn't abrasive enough so what we need to do is to coat the paper I'm going to start by putting a little of the bone ash onto my ground glass slab and I'm going to add red LED pigment ivory black and myself you know add a little bit of water ground into a bowl so now a little bit of glue needs enough to bind it all together and create a smooth surface on the paper [Music] so here we have the dried ground as I bring the silver point across onto the ground immediately you can see the strokes but equally you can draw as cursive Lee as you like paper in there now those day was handmade from rags which were beaten to a pulp and the paper was formed by dipping a sieve called a mold into the VAT of pulp Leonardo like most artists of his period would have drawn in ink using a quill pen much like this made from a goose feather so I've had these feathers baking for about an hour in hot Sun to harden the end of the quill and to absorb some of the oils we have to first of all scrape away the membrane from the tip of the quill cut the quill to a convenient length about a hand span and then had to make two cuts and then cut the tip square and inscribe a small groove inside the tip of the nail to allow the ink to flow towards the tip so I think that Leonardo used was made from oak gall gum arabic and iron sulfate what the quill allows the artist to do is to draw very fine lines when he wants to and you know you use that technique on a lot of his anatomical drawings to get the very very sharp delineations of shade on curved surfaces equally though he could use the pen as a means of working out his designs and it was a very creative process using almost scribbly lines we've got natural black chalk here which is very rich in carbon and we've got natural red chalk which is rich in iron and the reason that the NADA used these materials was to allow him a sort of freer style of drawing it's quite hard with this kind of chalk to achieve the delicacy of line you see for example in the study of the man from behind and I'm going to try the black chalk and this is a good deal harder and this is much more like the quality of material that Leonardo had available to him Leonardo frequently used black chalk as an under drawing to some of his ink drawings particularly the anatomical drawings leonardo used watercolors a lot in his maps the watercolors used at that time are exactly the same as the watercolors we use nowadays and they consist of a ground pigment and gum arabic the gum water is added slowly until you get a very thick paste and that's poured into some container and artists in the Renaissance period used shells somewhat like this this is a freshwater mussel show they're not as constant experimentation with materials and form show his genius straining to express the product of his imagination understanding how these works were produced brings us closer to one of history's greatest creative minds [Music]

Channel: Royal Collection Trust

Views: 984,415

Keywords: exhibition, leonardo da vinci, leonardo, drawing, drawing materials, renaissance, paper conservation, da vinci, leonardo da vinci documentary, royal collection, italian renaissance, how to draw like leonardo da vinci

Id: -f0ym3CtleQ

Length: 5min 10sec (310 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 29 2019