Welcome to the Pentax Forums!
Originally posted by paulpixeld I've tried using the manual white balance setup. But it does not set a "white point" the spot in the image that represents the edge of blown out density.
You are correct, white balance does not set the white point. Instead it matches the image processor's spectral interpretation to the color temperature of the light illuminating your subject. Set your manual white balance to the color temperature of your studio lighting. Alternatively one may also set the white balance based on an 18% gray card exposure. The user manual may be helpful in that regard.
As for capturing the full detail of the work, it is probably useful to think in terms of intensity/brightness rather than density,* with a limit of 14 stops of range between black clipping at the low end and white clipping at the high end. Since the numeric tonal values are strongly biased towards the high end of the scale, the approach is to provide adequate exposure to record tonality at the low end (shadows) while taking steps to not throw away most of the highlight tones.
As noted above, the most common approach with an extreme high contrast subject is to merge a series of bracketed exposures to capture the full detail and tonality of both highlights and shadow while maintaining a graceful rendering of midtones. The approach is loosely termed HDR for high dynamic range and can effectively mimic several additional stops of capture range.
Your K-1 is able to do in-camera HDR with either immediate rendering to JPEG or capture to a special PEF/DNG RAW file for out-of-camera processing using the PDCU software that came with the camera. A third option is to capture a series of bracketed exposures with highest EV intended to capture the shadows and the lowest to capture the highlights. The bracketed exposures are merged in post-processing software to produce the final image. Using the camera's HDR abilities is the easiest option while merging a bracketed series with other tools provides the most control.
I would play with both the HDR feature and regular exposures and see what works best. It may be that HDR is not required and to be honest, I strongly suspect that to be the case. To aid in getting proper base exposure, you might want to consider using an 18% gray card for metering to the incident light using M mode as opposed to letting the matrix metering makes its best guess in an automated exposure mode based on reflected light. This should allow the high values to fall naturally into their normal range of brightness with full structural detail. I would turn off both highlight and shadow correction for this exercise and bracket both sides of the metered exposure to find the points where highlight and shadow detail are held.
Edit: I should have looked up "silverpoint" before offering detailed advice. Silverpoint drawings offer a very limited range of intermediate tones and should be easily accessible to a K-1 without resorting to advanced technique. A reflected light reading using an 18% gray card or incident light reading with a hand-held meter should support the full range of values in the artwork. Exposure compensation, if needed at all, should very mild, probably less than 1.5 stops either direction. The histogram should peak far right with the rightmost tail on the verge of clipping.
Silverpoint : noun
The art of drawing with a silver-pointed instrument on paper prepared with a coating of powdered bone or zinc white, creating a fine durable line composed of metal fragments.
Steve
* Density is descriptive when working with silver-based photographic negatives or when printing, but does not translate well when working with the positive (additive) image formed with direct digital capture.