Epigrapher Toon Sykora Creating a Digital Pencil Drawing on the iPad Pro Using Procreate

Team Barsha epigrapher Toon Sykora creating a digital pencil drawing on the iPad Pro.

Continued from PART FOUR...

Djehutihotep’s funerary chapel, cut into the center of the north wall, was dedicated to the tomb owner and his father, Kay. Both men are depicted on the walls receiving offerings. Although these scenes are common in subject matter, they contain some of the most carefully painted and best-preserved decorative elements of the entire tomb, making this shrine an excellent candidate for showcasing the applied methodology.

An orthorectified photographic image formed the base of the Dayr al-Barsha project's digital drawings. For each of the sidewalls of the shrine, over 200 images were used to create the orthophoto in Agisoft PhotoScan. This orthophoto was then scaled using on-site measurements. Finally, any areas which may have been blurred or distorted in the orthophoto were manually corrected by aligning clearer photographs with the underlying orthophoto.

In addition to the orthophotos, they used a large set of close-up images taken with a 60mm macro lens on a DSLR, which at full size gave a magnification of the decoration that was impossible to achieve with the naked eye. These close-ups allowed the team to really catch every detail that the ancient artists created with their brush.

In the end, this orthophoto was taken to the site to create the initial drawing (the equivalent of the old ‘pencil drawing’) on the iPad Pro. The software used for this step was the economically priced but incredibly versatile app, Procreate. Furthermore, embedding the iPad in a custom-made wooden drawing board gave the epigrapher the stability necessary for creating such precise digital renderings on site.

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