It’s not just black and white!

Did you know: an original black-and-white graphite drawing, like the one below, is in fact made up of a complex range of colour tones? In other words, no ‘black-and-white’ drawing truly is just black and white.

Image by Nastasia Kalinina via Unsplash

This adds complexity when digitally reproducing graphite artwork and, unless handled by an expert, can yield disappointing results when printing.

At Studio 74, we’ve developed a bespoke proofing process for graphite artwork, informed by our understanding of the medium and its nuances. Our reproductions are tonally accurate, punchy and clean, meaning we’re trusted by many beautiful graphite artists.

Why your graphite drawing is not purely black and white

1. Your pencils

   
   

   Graphite pencils are made by combining graphite (a crystalline form of carbon) with clay. Depending on the amount and type of clay used, the tone of your pencil will vary. Impurities in the carbon can also bring in a smoky tint. When applying graphite to paper, many artists also know that it takes on a metallic, reflective quality, sometimes called ‘graphite shine’. This can add blue or silvery hues to your artwork. To simply print your image in monochrome would therefore remove some of these subtle characteristics.

 Image used with kind permission from Kevin Hayward

2. Your paper

   
   

   The paper you use will affect the overall colouring of your artwork. If your paper is a warm off-white, for example, your drawing will also have a warm hue, as the paper colour will still be visible in places where graphite is applied sparingly, producing a level of translucency. Though this soft colouring may not appear significant on the original, it will become clearly visible when trying to print a reproduction of the artwork on paper with a different tone. The difference is especially distracting when the drawing contains large areas of negative space.

The Studio 74 process for reproducing graphite drawings with stunning results

We treat your graphite drawing as colour artwork, taking it through our rigorous colour proofing process to ensure we get the tone just right in the final print. This means we use our experience to digitally adjust the hue of the scanned image of your artwork, then print it to check for accuracy against the original. We repeat this process iteratively until we’ve achieved a spot-on colour match.

If the paper you choose to print on is very different from the paper you have drawn on, we can digitally remove the plain background of your artwork to give a clean, crisp result in print. We’ll then carefully balance the tone of your pencil marks against the colour of your chosen printing paper. This is often a compromise between retaining the authentic tone of your drawing and making sure it will suitably match the printing paper’s natural colour.

The result is a stunning reproduction which stays true to your original, takes into account its subtleties and gives a crisp finish on whichever printing paper you choose.