Late Update

Wow, it’s been awhile. I have been working on several projects, on and off, but haven’t taken the time to update.

I have a new update for the map I’m creating for Matt Hoffman (technospiritualist):

Commissioned Map

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And I recently (re-)started my world building project. You can follow my progress at Worlds of Sand, where I hope to update at least weekly. I’m also open for all sorts of commissions! You can find me on the Cartographers Guild forums or just e-mail me through this blog (I’m thinking of setting up on Deviantart too).

I am still planning on rearranging this blog a bit, which means some posts may disappear pretty soon as I move things around. I’m not restarting, though; I just want to move some things to a different home (like those photos of Paris, randomly taking up tons of post-space …). Most everything will reappear somewhere else at some point, so if you’re just coming to the site and wondering if you missed something, you probably haven’t.

Hopefully I’ll be able to update more often now!

 

Hand Drawn Maps

After working for quite a while in Photoshop and Illustrator on various iterations of my map of Graven, I’ve decided to take a step back and try something new. I thought it would interesting to see a city grown not inwards from an island, which is what I’ve been doing, but outwards from a single point, a single building. To that end, I’ve been setting myself up for hand drawing the city in pencil (and later inking it, possibly also by hand), starting from scratch. In order to show individual buildings and leave for labeling, which I’ll probably do in PS just to make things easier for myself, I’ll be drawing rather large and working across several sheets of paper. The biggest obstacle was figuring out how I wanted to draw it. I’ve decided to go with drawing lots, which will create streets and on which I’ll be drawing the individual buildings. Since Graven is pretty dense through most of the city, that will work for most of the area. Where buildings are more spread out, in farm land or suburban/rural areas, I’ll just lightly draw in the street edges. This 17th century map of London illustrates what I’m talking about in terms of lots defining streets, but I won’t be drawing my map in this exact style.

Just to motivate myself and get some inspiration, I went looking for other city maps drawn by hand. And I not only found this great website on mapping called Radical Cartography, I found a post about a giant city map drawn entirely in pencil spanning dozens of regular white printer papers. The artist calls the city Pencilvania, and you can click on individual images to view them full size. Very inspiring (even if most of the streets seem to be completely straight, with only freeway exits/entrances curving). If Daren Keene, the artist of Pencilvania, can do that, well then so can I! I’ll be working in a different style, but it’s fun to see what someone else has come up with. Hopefully I’ll be able to post a preliminary draft later today.

 

Graven

Alright, here’s an update of my map of Graven. I’m trying something a little new here (or rather, I’m retrying something I did for an earlier version of the city). I haven’t erased out all the streets or plazas for this area yet, as you can see around the river area in the lower right and then also over on the left side. Right now I’m focusing on the streets, but I think there’s going to be a park or two in there somewhere, and I want to put in courtyards and such. I also have to work on the ‘coasts’ – not all the buildings sit right up against the water’s edge, of course. Some will project out over the water, others will be set back. And of course bridges are missing, and I need to figure out how to draw in the smaller, semi-private docks on the water next to individual buildings/blocks. That is for later, however, as I have a lot of homework and other studying to do. Once I have a portion of this map done, I want to take it into Google SketchUp and see what I can do to create a 3D map. I also want to print this whole thing out as a line drawing so I can trace over it and create an isometric hand drawn map. Which sounds impossibly overly ambitious of me, but I want to give it a try.