The Palette/metal/Beaten or refined from metal
Silver leaf
Cheaper than gold, brighter than gold, and it turns black, which is why almost every historical silver surface you have seen is now a dark stain.
Also called white gold · chandi ka varak · aluminium leaf (the modern substitute)
- Hex
- #C4C6C8
- RGB
- 196, 198, 200
- First used
- Antiquity
- From
- Everywhere silver was worked
What it is
Silver, beaten to leaf. Modern substitutes are aluminium, which does not tarnish.
How it is made
Beaten in the same way as gold leaf, though it cannot be taken as thin, silver is less malleable, so silver leaf is thicker and easier to handle, which makes it the material to learn gilding on.
Because it tarnishes, historical practice was to varnish or glaze over it immediately. A yellow glaze over silver reads as gold, and this substitution was used constantly and openly as an economy, in manuscripts, on frames and on furniture. Half the gold you think you are looking at is glazed silver, and conservators find this routinely.
The history
Silver's problem is sulfur. Atmospheric sulfur compounds convert the surface to silver sulfide, which is black, and there is nothing to be done about it except polishing or sealing. In a manuscript the tarnished silver has often blackened the page as well, so a decorated initial that was once bright is now a dark smear with a halo.
This is why the historical record is misleading. Objects designed as a contrast of bright gold against bright silver now read as gold against black, which inverts the tonal relationship the maker intended. Illuminated manuscripts, Japanese screens, and Renaissance armour decoration all suffer this, and you have to correct for it mentally every time.
Aluminium leaf, available since the twentieth century, does not tarnish and is very cheap. It is what almost all 'silver' architectural and sign gilding uses now, and palladium or white gold leaf is the premium non-tarnishing option.
Where it is used
Gilding, manuscripts, Japanese screens and lacquer, mirrors historically, signwriting, and food: chandi ka varak on Indian sweets, though most of that is now aluminium or is regulated against.
The design point is about materials that change. Silver was chosen for brightness and became darkness, and nobody who specified it wanted that. Anything you specify that oxidises, fades, yellows or wears is a decision about how the thing will look in ten years, whether or not you made that decision consciously. Copper and brass go green and brown, white plastics yellow, uncoated steel rusts, and a good brief says what the intended aged state is.
Go and look at it
Blackened silver in illuminated manuscripts
British Library, London
The dark patches were bright. The tonal scheme of the page has inverted.
Japanese silver-leaf screens
Tokyo National Museum
Tarnish, sometimes accepted and worked with as a deliberate patina.
How it behaves
- Made of
- Silver, beaten to leaf. Modern substitutes are aluminium, which does not tarnish.
- Opacity
- Opaque. It covers what is under it.
- Lightfastness
- Permanent. It will outlive the thing it is painted on.
- Tarnishes to black silver sulfide, and can blacken the substrate with it.
- Thicker and easier to handle than gold leaf, the beginner's material.
- Under a yellow glaze it reads convincingly as gold, and frequently was.
The numbers
All derived from the hex, never typed beside it
- HEX
- #C4C6C8
- What a browser and a design file want.
- RGB
- 196, 198, 200
- The same three numbers in base ten. Light, not ink.
- HSL
- 210°, 4%, 78%
- Hue, saturation, lightness, how a person describes a colour.
- CMYK
- 2, 1, 0, 22
- Arithmetic only. A real separation depends on the press, the paper and a profile.
- LAB
- 80, 0, -1
- Perceptual. L* of 80 is how light this actually looks, which HSL gets wrong.
This hex is an approximation, and a page about pigment has to say so. Silver leaf is a substance. A ground mineral scatters light from thousands of separate grains at slightly different angles, and no single sRGB value is that event. It is a flat average of a photograph of it, and the real thing is outside what a screen can emit. Use the number to specify a screen colour. Do not use it to judge the pigment.
Where it sits on the wheel
Hue 210°
Its opposite, by the diagram
The arithmetic opposite, 180° round in HSL. Useful, and not the same as the opposite a painter mixing pigment would name, that wheel was built for paint.
Lighter and darker
Towards white
Mixing with white does not only lighten, it dulls and cools. This is why a pale tint of a brand colour so often looks chalky, and why a designed light shade beats a generated one.
Towards black
Mixing with black kills the hue as it darkens. A better dark is usually the colour plus its neighbour round the wheel, which is what every painter does instead.
Can you set type on it
Handgloves
White on it
1.71:1 · Fails
Handgloves
Black on it
12.26:1 · AAA
Handgloves
It on paper
1.63:1 · Fails
Handgloves
It on ink
10.68:1 · AAA
4.5:1 is the floor for body text and 3:1 for large text, by WCAG. Treat it as a minimum you may not go under rather than as a target: plenty of pairs pass at 4.6:1 and are still unpleasant to read for a page, and the checker will not tell you that.
Read more, elsewhere
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