So, this is a project originally undertaken to help me visualise a piece of land and its settlement for a comic I was in the process of creating (writing and drawing). Part of a series of heritage/museum comics I’d been creating for a local museum service.

The comic is about Ravenser Odd, a curious port that appeared in the Humber in the 13th century, and within about 100yrs had disappeared back into its temperamental waters. If you are local to Hull and Holderness, you might well know about it already, if not, it’s definitely worth a look (curious little bit of history that it is.
I first stumbled upon it back in 2008 after I moved back to the area and had time to kill between new jobs, so spent a fair amount of time in the old library history section, before it all got moved to The History Centre.
It is currently being re-appraised, with archaeologists and maritime specialists are trying to find the remains of it harbour wall in the humber. I’m neither a maritime specialist, nor an archaeologist (so I imagine I have made a great deal of mistakes here) though I have trained as an archaeological illustrator way back in my career, working at the old Humberside Archaeology Unit that was then (late 80’s) based at Beverley Beck. Then later as a historical illustrator, creating illustrations for museums across the UK.

Okay, so in my comic script a character makes a card model to help with their investigations. It seemed like a good idea in the moment to do that myself, with the bonus that I could use it as a drawing aid, having easy basic blocking reference to hand. The model took about two days to make from scratch, priming it the following day.

The model in the video is the result. It’s not particularly finessed, nor are the scales super accurate, and of course all historical in accuracies/omissions/exaggerations are my doing…

I am hoping to create a longer video looking at the making of the model and the conceptual process I undertook to make the decisions I made. Plus of course the (I’d like to think, I formed) narrative/storytelling liberties I also took.