Archaeological Illustration
At university, I studied for a BA in Archaeology & Prehistory (I wanted to be Indiana Jones), and this led to a period of time hopping around the country scraping at the earth to uncover ancient remains and recording them for academic review. It was through this work that I was drawn to archaeological illustration. An archaeological illustrator’s job is to record ancient, and sometimes fragile objects, in as much detail as possible, without obscurring the academically important information. These are not meant to be works of art, though they do have that quality, but are instead an illustrated record for further study. Each piece is drawn at scale and intricately measured to be as accurate a representation of the real artefact as possible. This form of academic drawing is far superior to photographs which, even with the best lighting and resolution, still cannot reveal the important details obvious to a trained eye (like the percussion waves evident in worked flint, which you can see in the images below).
Undertaking these illustrations for universities, consultancies, and even some private commissions, I learned a lot about working to time, following predetermined principals of how to create this type of image (while still having my own discernable style), and preparing images for publication.
Some artefacts. like the flint arrowhead above, were no more than a few centimetres in size, while others were much larger, like the Aethelwald Stone (an Anglo-Saxon tomb slab, circa 9th century - pictured in the banner at the top of this page), which is nearly two metres long. It takes an intense and prolonged act of concentration to be able to render any of these objects faithfully, though the Aethelwald stone was perhaps my biggest commission.
Just to show that I’m not all about digital work, I can also turn my hand to physical works of art and illustration, if needed. Let me know if this is of interest and we can talk it through in more detail.