Recently the most challenging and unique items to be digitised were the lino-cuts! If, like me, you are unsure what a lino-cut is; well, it’s a carved piece of the artist’s work, Kyffin Williams in this example, that was used to make prints!
Some of these were rather large and heavy, and they were a problem when it came to scanning them, because at one point, we were worried that they were not only a bit too big for the scanner, but also too heavy!
“Due to the nature of the Kyffin Williams lino-cuts we had to use a different process than we would for flat, printed materials. The large scanners we normally use have very flat, even lighting and the tests we did didn’t really show the depth of the cuts very well. We used a medium format camera fitted with a 22 megapixel digital back attached to a copy-stand. This set-up allowed us to use just one source of light, from one side, which brought out the detail and depth of the tooling in the lino”.
Here is a sneak preview of one of them for you, there is also an image of Simon scanning one of the items.
Lon Vaughan