When National Geographic Magazine sent me on assignment to reconstruct ancient Etruscan iron smelting. I traveled to Populonia, Italy along with archaeologists to check out the actual location.
Today the site is an ordinary tourist beach, but it was a once a gritty industrial scene choked with smoke and slag.
Men would be operating animal-skin bellows and prying up ingots of the valuable metal, which by 700 BC was replacing bronze for tools and weapons.
I wanted to use old-school academic methods for working out the figures, so I hired models and captured my own poses with charcoal studies to plan the action.
My first compositional layout was too close to the work site. The art director and I agreed to pull the view back so we could see the boats in the harbor and allow the acropolis to rise above all and catch the sun.
For more about analog approaches to picture-making, check out my book Imaginative Realism
Those drawings would look good in a full history book about the Etruscan civilization.
Great imagery for depicting history