My day job is a software engineer at Microsoft in the UK. I mention this because after our latest reorganisation we were formed into four development crews and rather than call them 1, 2, 3, 4 or A ,B ,C, D we decided to have a little internal poll on what to call them. The most popular idea has been adopted and so each crew is named after a top code breaker who worked at Bletchley Park, and who happened to be women as well.
The number of contemporary photos of these unsung heroes are very very limited and there is only so much you can do with photoshop to bring them more to life so I thought it was time to break out the pencils.
Here we have Mavis Lever (blue), Joan Clarke (green), Jean Briggs (red), and Margaret Rock (brown), These were done just using a couple of water colour pencils to recreate the duotone effect of the period when colour printing was expensive. Arranging their portraits like this is a nod to the Microsoft logo. Each took about 1-2 hours. Jean still looks a little odd to my eye, and the detail on Joan is light because the only two photos of here I could find were very very grainy whole figure shots.
