Silver carries weight. Gold catches light. Bronze ages with extraordinary grace. We help you understand what each metal brings to your portrait.
The choice of metal is, in our experience, more personal than most people expect. Clients come in expecting to choose on price and leave having chosen on feeling. Metal has personality — and the right metal for a portrait is the one that best reflects the person within it.
18k Yellow Gold
Our most requested metal, and with good reason. 18k yellow gold — 75% pure gold alloyed with copper and silver — has a warmth that no other material quite replicates. Against polished areas it glows. In recessed shadow zones it deepens into amber. It is a forgiving metal to work: cast details emerge crisp and the polishing stage brings an almost luminous surface quality.
We recommend yellow gold for portraits of people who were warm, vivid, full of life. It is also the appropriate choice for a piece intended to be worn daily — gold at this purity is resistant to tarnish and will outlast a generation of wearing without any maintenance beyond gentle cleaning.
Sterling Silver
Silver is the choice for those who prefer restraint. Against a polished silver surface, portrait details appear with remarkable precision — the cool, neutral tone draws the eye to form rather than surface. Shadow zones can be deliberately oxidised to increase contrast, giving a silver portrait a graphic quality that gold does not naturally possess.
Sterling silver does require more care than gold: it will tarnish over time, particularly in humid climates, and benefits from occasional polishing. Some of our clients specifically love this quality — a silver piece, worn and gently tarnished, acquires a patina that deepens its character. It begins to look, after years of wearing, like an object with a past.
Bronze
Bronze is the oldest portrait metal — it has been used for memorial reliefs and coins for more than three thousand years — and it carries that history. A bronze portrait has an immediate sense of permanence, of archival weight. It is the metal we recommend for commissions intended for display rather than wearing: a desktop piece, a framed relief, something that will sit in a study and be looked at daily.
Bronze takes a patina over time that is, to many eyes, the most beautiful of all the metals — a complex, living surface of browns, ochres, and greens that changes with light and handling. Some clients request that we apply a chemical patina at the outset; others prefer to let time do the work naturally.
“The right metal for a portrait is the one that best reflects the person within it.”
White Gold and Rose Gold
We also work in 18k white gold and 18k rose gold on request. White gold produces a portrait of extraordinary sharpness and modernity — it reads as cool and precise. Rose gold is the most intimate of the gold alloys: its blush warmth is well-suited to portraits of children or pieces with a tender, personal quality. Both are priced similarly to yellow gold and share its practical durability.
If you are uncertain which metal to choose, we encourage you to request a metal sample pack before confirming your commission. We send small polished discs of each available metal so you can handle them in natural light and against your skin before deciding. Most clients make their choice within the first minute of holding them.
