Silver Brooch

This was a small illustration of a silver brooch I did for the ODHS (Oliver & District Heritage Society) society newsletter. Myself and Janell, my awesome co-worker, were asked to write small bios for the newsletter today. We're the newest faces at the museum, and the director thought it would be a good idea to introduce us to all of the members! She asked me to do a little illustration, since it's one of my fields and interests and they'd put it in the newsletter. so..I picked a small artefact that I could do in one sitting, and did that! I did this piece on two sheets of perma-trace, one for pencil and the other for inking. The brooch was owned by a long-time resident and teacher of Oliver.

Isle of Man Ballacagen Excavations

There were illustrations I completed for Dr. Harold Mytum of the University of Liverpool, in the summer of 2012. I was working as a project illustrator and supervisor at the field school run by Dr. Mytum through Liverpool and the Centre for Manx Studies. These artefacts were from a previous excavation of the site...I can't currently remember which one it was (either the original excavation by Gerhard Bersu in the 40's or another one possibly done in the 80's...eep!). Not found last year though! The cross sections were measured and drawn in person, during a visit to the Manx Museum. I used a set of digital callipers and rulers to get the measurements as accurate as possible. Objects were then photographed by Dr. Mytum next to a set of rules and on 1mm gridded paper. These photographs allowed me to re-create accurate illustrations of the artefacts back at the Centre for Manx Studies. This process was undertaken because we only had access to the artefacts for one afternoon, and it would take me the next nearly 2 weeks to complete all of the illustrations. What you see in those two images are 2 pages of the large set I did, reduced to about 70%. The first page, with the massive perforated stone is my favourite! It's most likely a large weight for a loom or a thatched roof, but I spent the entire time at the Centre calling it my 'giant spindle whorl'. There are spindle whorls drawn, as well as some interesting long stones, which were most likely used as sharpening stones for blades. The objects that look like small broken rings are just that, and the small broken pieces next to them are something unknown. They might have been decorative ceramics for..something. We're unsure. The large stone with the cross is something particularly interesting! The cross is a naturally occurring cross of two seams of quartz in the middle of the stone, but this stone had some shaping, and was found inside a round house. This indicates that the possessor most likely found it and saw the cross, and brought it home because of the image. It's very exciting!

King Richard III coin. Ink Illustration.

This very rare Richard III Penny is for sale at Historic Coinage . I did the illustration for the seller, and it was a pretty fantastic opportunity! Said coin the current best example of this sort of penny, even better than the one held by the British Museum! This is the completed ink illustration done from a photograph of the coin itself. This illustration is considerably larger than the actual coin, but was not needed as a technical illustration for a journal or anything, so was not done to a particular scale. I used two pieces of permatrace (velum) for this illustration, one for the pencil layer, and one for the inking. I then scanned the image into photoshop and touched up particular areas for the final product digitally. Both the recto and verso sides are shown

King Richard III Coin

Here is a little picture of me doing an outline illustration of one of the best surviving examples of a King Richard III coin. As everyone is aware, he was just recently found in a car park that used to be a church. There will be a better image of this up as soon as I edit the image a bit digitally tomorrow, to make sure everything is as crisp and clear as possible!

Nicaraguan Point

This is an illustration I did before the summer, of a lovely point from Nicaragua. The chert, I believe it was chert, was a fantastic blood red colour and was found in a burial urn, placed in the an individual's mouth. It was wonderful to work with such a unique piece! This point was found during excavations in Nicaragua by Dr. Geoffrey McCafferty.

Vessel from Cholula

Picture has my other blog's tags on it..but oh well. That is an illustration I did for Dr. McCafferty at the University of Calgary. It was an outline drawing of a vessel from Cholula, where the photo wasn't good enough for publication. It also seemed that the single photo was from the early 1900's and no others were around. Where the actual vessel is, I'm still not sure! Regardless, I had to restore / recreate part of the image on the vessel, using what I know about images used in mesoamerican cultures, and their tendency to like things being pretty mirrored and things. I could use one of the heads on one side to fix the opposite side. 'Pretend you're Mexican' My instructions went something like that. Awesome!

Ceramic head

This is a pencil sketch of a ceramic figurine head from Mesoamerica. There are two more views of the head I haven't posted, but they look very similar to these ones. Figurines aren't my strongest suit, but I'm very pleased with how this turned out! What do you think? How could my ceramics be improved?