Music To Draw Pots By...

Today I at last got down to the much-anticipated  task of illustrating the prehistoric pottery.  I find it quite theraputic.  I get to retreat to a quiet corner of the office, where I can put on a CD and bury myself in artefacts.

This work is not without difficulties.  I'm sure that all Neolithic and Bronze Age pot sherds are filled with an intrinsic desire to return to the earth from whence they came.  When they come out of the ground they often have the consistency of a soggy flapjack, and even when they dry off they can be rather fragile.  Once they're dry, the sherds get packed away in nice little padded cosies of acid-free tissue paper before they make their first traumatic journey to the specialist.  After that, they come back for illustration.

It's a fiddly job which goes as follows:-

1) Extricate sherds from bags (without breaking them).

2) Try fitting sherds together to see if you've got enough adjoining pieces to draw a proper reconstructed pot,  This is like doing a jigsaw with half the pieces missing and no picture.  Oh, and half the edges are so abraded that you can't actually find the correct fit (again, this task should be done without breaking them).

3) Complete the drawing (without breaking any sherds).

It requires patience.  And the realisation that, however careful you are, you will invariably end up with more sherds than you started out with, mainly because some of your pieces are hanging together by a thread, anyway  (hey, it's not every job where you get to break something that's 5500 years old!!).

At the end of it all, your reward is, hopefully, an illustration that a) looks like what it's supposed to be, and b) looks good enough to go to journal.  Some commecial archaeological units have ditched the arts of the illustrator and opted instead for computer packages.  My employer, thank goodness, still subscribes to illustrating artefacts the traditional way (see my La Tene horse-mask icon for an example).

I enjoyed an unusual selection of music as I worked today.  It was all Classical.  I don't listen to Classical music much these days.  I used to play in a lot of orchestras as a teenager which means I tend to avoid it.  But I seem to be going through a Classical music appreciation phase just now.  I think it's something to do with the onset of springtime - I always play the Rite of Spring at this time of year as it reflects the feeling of primal energy and anticipation that's evident in every living thing.  So my soundtrack for the day was chosen from a CD anthology of Russian music - Prokofiev's Romeo & Juliet, Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade and Stravinsky's Petruchka.  This provoked amusement in my colleagues, but what the heck!

Tomorrow, I think I'll introduce them to The Pines of Rome by Respighi...  Or maybe the Scythian Suite by Prokofiev...

Music To Draw Pots By...

Today I at last got down to the much-anticipated  task of illustrating the prehistoric pottery.  I find it quite theraputic.  I get to retreat to a quiet corner of the office, where I can put on a CD and bury myself in artefacts.

This work is not without difficulties.  I'm sure that all Neolithic and Bronze Age pot sherds are filled with an intrinsic desire to return to the earth from whence they came.  When they come out of the ground they often have the consistency of a soggy flapjack, and even when they dry off they can be rather fragile.  Once they're dry, the sherds get packed away in nice little padded cosies of acid-free tissue paper before they make their first traumatic journey to the specialist.  After that, they come back for illustration.

It's a fiddly job which goes as follows:-

1) Extricate sherds from bags (without breaking them).

2) Try fitting sherds together to see if you've got enough adjoining pieces to draw a proper reconstructed pot,  This is like doing a jigsaw with half the pieces missing and no picture.  Oh, and half the edges are so abraded that you can't actually find the correct fit (again, this task should be done without breaking them).

3) Complete the drawing (without breaking any sherds).

It requires patience.  And the realisation that, however careful you are, you will invariably end up with more sherds than you started out with, mainly because some of your pieces are hanging together by a thread, anyway  (hey, it's not every job where you get to break something that's 5500 years old!!).

At the end of it all, your reward is, hopefully, an illustration that a) looks like what it's supposed to be, and b) looks good enough to go to journal.  Some commecial archaeological units have ditched the arts of the illustrator and opted instead for computer packages.  My employer, thank goodness, still subscribes to illustrating artefacts the traditional way (see my La Tene horse-mask icon for an example).

I enjoyed an unusual selection of music as I worked today.  It was all Classical.  I don't listen to Classical music much these days.  I used to play in a lot of orchestras as a teenager which means I tend to avoid it.  But I seem to be going through a Classical music appreciation phase just now.  I think it's something to do with the onset of springtime - I always play the Rite of Spring at this time of year as it reflects the feeling of primal energy and anticipation that's evident in every living thing.  So my soundtrack for the day was chosen from a CD anthology of Russian music - Prokofiev's Romeo & Juliet, Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade and Stravinsky's Petruchka.  This provoked amusement in my colleagues, but what the heck!

Tomorrow, I think I'll introduce them to The Pines of Rome by Respighi...  Or maybe the Scythian Suite by Prokofiev...