Illustrations of archaeological finds often turn out to be a significant obstacle in the completion of publication projects. Work involving manual drawing is particularly prone to cause delays and expense. In an age when it is possible to put men on the moon it may seem rather strange to see graphic artists setting to work with slide-gauges, pens, crayons and drawing paper when a drawing of an object is required. First the object has to be carefully measured up, then a pencil sketch is made, and then comes the most time-consuming, boring phase, during which the drawing is built up of thousands of dots laboriously positioned with pen and Indian ink. This is the time-honoured method, at any rate where the objects concerned are of materials such as metal, pottery, bone/antler or rock. A spear- or lance-head may thus very easily take half a day, and a pottery vessel with complicated decoration one or two days.
Why not use photos instead, then, one might well ask. Because the clarity of photographs is diminished in the reproduction phase, in particular during the process of screening the picture; this drastically reduces the resolution and drowns out the finer details. In this respect technology has to be said to be trailing behind.
But help is on the way. In the spring of 1995, at the National Museum's Centre for Maritime Archaeology and the Institute of Maritime Archaeology the foundations were laid for a new illustration-method which could well revolutionize the production of drawings of artefacts and in the long run spare considerable sums for museums and other research institutes.
In February 1995 I was given the task of drawing hundreds of finds from the Nydam excavation with a view to a major publication which was being planned. I reached out as usual for the customary tools, but faced with a task of this immense scale my thoughts turned instead to alternative strategies which all had the common factor that it must be possible to find a shortcut by using photos. Suddenly it came to me that as early as in the 1970s I had had some interesting results by copying from black-and-white negatives over onto hard lith-film. This resulted in artefact-pictures with a grained or dotted structure - very like what is normally painstakingly achieved by dotting with pen-and-ink. After turning my gaze on my computer, I came to realize that the solution was a combination of photo-technology and electronic picture-editing: the digital dark-room; i.e., a hybrid, which accounts for the working title, PhotoDraw.
Examples of illustrations of archaeological finds produced by Jørgen Holm using the PhotoDraw technique. 1: Strike-a-light from Nydam. 2: Bone comb from Nydam. 3: Strap-buckle from Nydam. 4: Shield-boss from Illerup.
The method, which has been developed in close and inspiring cooperation with Flemming Rieck and Erik Jørgensen, consists of transferring a photo of an artefact, black-and-white or colour, on paper or on slide - or a picture obtained with a digital camera or camera-scanner - to the computer and transforming it there into photo graphics in an advanced graphics-editing programme. Extremely fine black dots can then be applied, and the relative density of their distribution represents grey tones and other forms of shade and structure to create the image-element. The result is a 'drawing' which in principle is not differentiable from the drawings produced by conventional methods. It is estimated that with the new method - when it has been fully developed - it will be possible to produce illustrations of archaeological finds and museum objects 4-5 times faster than by the old method. In addition the drawings will be more faithful to the original and thus more objective than manual drawings, which always reflect a more or less subjective interpretation of the artefact. And anyone with a little talent for graphic and computer techniques and insight into them will relatively quickly be able to acquire the technique. It is also a distinct advantage that the drawings will then be available in electronic form, which will make it easier to highlight details, e.g. decoration which might not stand out sufficiently clearly on the original photo, and to integrate the drawings in a desktop-publishing project.
It is evident that the method can also be of use within other subject-areas where drawings of objects are necessary, e.g. geology/mineralogy, palaeontology (fossils) and biology.
Jørgen Holm