Drawing with Victor Ambrus

Time Team's illustrator and artist, Victor Ambrus, has been with the programme from the beginning. In the early days his contributions involved working on a touch-sensitive computer pallet connected to the graphics team's software. Today he crafts fine-art watercolours, which are digitised for the computer, complete with morphing animations in tandem with Raysan Al-Kubaisi's 3D graphics.

An illustrator of more than 300 books, Victor can capture just about anything and when trying to bring the trenches to life his pictures repeatedly hit the right note with the specialists.

'I never really know what I am coming to when I do a Time Team,' he says. 'They just say "It's a Roman site this week Victor" and that's about it. The first thing I do is to have a good look at the landscape so that I can set my picture into the right context. Then I keep a good eye on the trenches to see what's coming out and I always talk to the specialists a lot to make sure I'm on the right track.'

Victor creates between five and ten pictures for each programme over the three days of a dig. He often draws Tony, Phil and Mick into the characters and in recent years has worked more with colour.

'I like to use watercolour with my drawings – it can really highlight a piece,' he says. 'I don't have lots of equipment with me because I have to move about the site most of the day. I just have a small drawing board, my pencils and a small watercolour pallet. When I've finished a picture I leave it. I don't change any of them after the show.'

'Apart from a few rare examples that I've given away to people after programmes, I keep all of the pictures I do,' Victor says. 'I have nearly 12 years' worth of Time Team drawings at home. I say nearly because in the early days when we did the electronic computer thing I never had a hard copy, so those have been lost. That's why I really like to stick with pencil and paper today. I get to keep my original and the graphics chaps can do their marvellous stuff to a digitised copy.'

Victor Ambrus profile

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