In prep for Egypt I've been giving up my Sundays doing an archaeological drawing course. I've always liked drawing, am crap at it of course (utterly unlike certain artists of my acquaintance.) But I do think there are certain of these skills you can learn. Right, you have to be born Eric Clapton but anyone can learn the chords to Leaving on a Jet Plane and bash it out in the lounge room. The learning chords and strumming business is quite mechanical and can be acquired. So it is with archaeological drawing which is a technical process. Obviously it helps to have natural ability but the basic skills can come through practice. So the propaganda goes anyway.
So week one. We learnt to "set up" the drawing, which means getting the outline in exact proportion to the real thing. Then you do the detail. This involves 2mm graph paper, an array of set squares on stands (so you have your hands free), a honkload of rulers, vernier calipers, knitting needles, really friggin' expensive clutch pencils (with a sharpener that costs alone $12! Strike me pink, a sharpener that costs twelve dollars!), yellow tac, a hundred rubbers (note: erasers) and lots of squinting.
My first project was some kind of clay bird:
Apologies for it being wonky -- had awful trouble with the scanner and I don't dare try it again. As you can see most of the detail involves shading. The old representing-a-three-dimensional-object-in-two-dimensions trick. Knowing how to do that properly (I don't) is where practice and technique comes in too.Anyway, birdy was OK for a first effort. Next was a wee Sekhmet-y figure (don't quote me) which was more challenging and thus, less successful
See the whatsit she's holding? It's supposed to match up in the plan (front on) and profile views but doesn't. Boo.
Last week we moved on to ... sherds! Which were the seventh ring of hell. On account of maths, we can work out from the angle of the curve of a pot sherd how big the pot was. It's like magic! A sherd is important in terms of the position it had in the overall pot, so you have to image it spatially in three dimensions ... then draw it in two. Spatial awareness! That's for boys! This is what I came up with. It doesn't look like much but it took me all day and maybe a nerd somewhere would find it vital, were it to be published. (Ha!)
On the right is a view of the sherd I had and on the right is the reconstruction from it of the rim. Sherds are hard.
This Sunday is our last class and is inking a drawing. Think I'll use birdy for that.
4 comments:
Cool.Like the birdy. Coming along and with a $12 sharper how can you fail ;)
I don't get the sherdy one either.
Blogger being weird, my edits not showing up. Anyway I added this update:
Drawing sherds at Hierakonopolis. This explains the process much better than I, except we weren't allowed to use the profile comb. Old skool, yo.
As a student, Hierakonpolis was my first experience of drawing sherds. It was one of the more frustrating experiences I have encountered as a student archaeologist.
HA! Preach it, brother.
In my experience, drawing is at least 85% just practice. More than that for a technical sort of drawing like you have to do here. That said, I like the bird a lot. Obviously I can't compare it to the source material, but the volume of it is quite convincing.
I'm just a bit surprised that drawing is considered a necessary skill now that high-quality, cheap digital photography is so prevalent. Old skool indeed.
Everything is photographed too (three days of it in my itinary below) but for research purposes drawings are still preferred for a couple of reasons. The purpose is not just to show people the cool things we found but provide a record for researchers creating typologies. With a drawing you have a human element who can discriminate the relevant details and also who can get all the detail in – what detail you get in a phot is dependant on the light source, lens, foreshortening etc etc. It might not be so obvious with the bird but look at the lithics collections, you’re not going to get that kind of fine detail on one object in one photo. All these things, even the ones made from moulds, have bumps and imperfections and curves which pictures may not pick up but a human running a finger over it can (and they are important because if you can establish two geographically separate finds came from the one mould, fer instance, you can make inferences about trade and trade routes etc so the level of detail is important.)
Also, I find it so much easier to quickly look at one of these drawings and absorb the detail of it than I do with photos.
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