Quote:
Pencilling is black bars, stripes or spots placed on an otherwise brown feather.
In your case, your girl is silver which prevents the brown pigment from showing so they become essentially "black and white". So for your girl's case, what the pencilling did was put black bars/spots on a white feather.
Pencilling is highly variable- it is highly affected by many other genes. Gold laced Wyandottes have pencilling that is "highly modified" by several genes. Campines are pencilled.
Barring puts white bars across a feather. A Barred Rock is actually a solid black chicken, however they also have the barring gene which puts the white bars on the feathers making them black and white looking. Barred is also sex linked.
The only difference between buff and light brahmas is that buffs have gold, lights have silver. It's the silver "stopping" the buff color from showing up so therefore they(light brahmas) "turn out" white bodied with black on necks and tails.
Gray silkies are Partridge silkies with Silver added.. turning them into the black(greyish in their case though) and white verisons of partridge.
Pretty bird and good luck with your projects.
p.s. White is NOT a color. It is simply a gene that PREVENTS whatever color/patterns a bird has from showing up visually. A white bird could be solid black, barred, blue, partridge etc but you just can't see it on the bird at all. So the advise something like "breed X with white to improve..." is not really understanding this fact, probably.
