The Illustrated Archive
At the Illustrated Archive we invited artist Lucy Roscoe to work with us to bring our archive and local history collections to life through her beautiful illustrations and paper sculptures. She created 25 amazing cartoons, and has produced a wonderful magazine showing some of her inspiration from our newspaper archive, along with her illustrations.
Lucy is a lifelong fan of libraries, museums and archives and much of her work is based on stories she comes across in her research. At the John Gray Centre she created a variety of works in response to some of the unique stories in our collections. The first thing she did was a series of illustrations inspired by our Haddington Criminal Register. The register documents the variety of misdemeanours committed in the town around 1894–1901. It describes the crime, the punishment and the perpetrator, right down to their teeth – they were either good or bad!
'The Silver Arrow', paper sculpture by Lucy Roscoe
Lucy also created a beautiful paper sculpture for the archive’s exhibition, Sporting East Lothian, of an archer winning the Musselburgh Silver Arrow, thought to be the oldest sporting trophy in the world.
Lucy has been out and about in East Lothian illustrating scenes from all around the county to produce a series of limited edition illustrations. Some of her sketches are on her August blog, with more about her inspiration and explorations in September.
Lucy’s illustrations and cartoons can be seen here, and you can visit her monthly blogs to find out about how she works and what’s been inspiring her.
Lucy and the Archives
Lucy’s blogs:
July introduces the project.
August shows more sketches from my travels around East Lothian.
September shows my work in progress as I sketch and create the cartoons.
October shows some of the handwriting examples that have been inspiring me.
November shows some of my favourite finds in the archives, including the East Lothian bank note.
December is all about the infamous East Lothian bank robbery!
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