Very Expensive Maps

Colorado Springs artist and arborist Reynold Mackey on his decade of hand-carving accurate physiographic globes out of solid wood, how to translate a 2D topobathymetric map onto a sphere, art as family business, casting globes in bronze, chainsaw-carving to Hendrix and dental pick-carving to Debussy, why hard work is an ally to meaning, learning welding, leatherwork and paper lacquering to make gl...

Oregon lead cartographer and product manager Neil Allen talks atlas production with East View Geospatial’s Benchmark Maps , the years of mapmaking and months of ground-truthing required to create a Texas atlas, adventures in custom cartography (clients include the U.S. Coast Guard, The Cascadia Institute and an eccentric millionaire’s treasure hunt ), the importance of asking the locals, using dec...

Ontario explorer, mapmaker, and conservationist Hap Wilson on drawing 400 guide maps across 50 years, traveling more than 40,000 miles of Canadian wilderness by canoe, the one digital tool he likes (it’s Google Earth), saving lives by creating a map that, unlike the one it replaced, did not send tourists over a waterfall, retracing thousand-year-old trails to prevent their effacement by dams and c...

Colorado painter, illustrator and mapmaker Erick Ingraham on solving art directors’ problems, making it interesting for himself (“I’m known to make things more complicated than they might need to be”), spending eight years painting the Rockies’ western slope, working from his own photographs, taking inspiration from the past, getting into the culture of what he’s mapping, drawing coastlines, and s...

London artist and mapmaker Stephen Walter on two decades of drawing and painting “the semiotic residues of humankind,” an invitation to map an Ivorian national park (and why you should wait for the dry season before attempting this), approaching six years of work on an NYC map, interpreting Michael Drayton’s 17th c. topographical poem Poly-Olbion into a 6x5 ft. folkloric tour of England and Wales,...

Manhattan writer and cartographer John Tauranac on his first maps of Midtown’s pedestrian passages, a public debate with Massimo Vignelli (“His geography was egregious”), working at a very different MTA (they used to have an aesthetics committee?), the “no improvements” made to the subway map since he chaired the 1979 MTA map committee, guiding Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s helicopter photo surveys of Ma...

In early 2023 GIS analyst and cartographer Andrew Middleton saw a tweet about Andy Nosal’s search for someone to take over The Map Center , Nosal's map shop in Pawtucket, RI; six months later Middleton left California to move into one of the last map retail stores in the U.S. We discuss his goal of turning the shop into an inviting retail space and field trip destination, inciting new maps of...

Lyonnais illustrator and designer Lionel Portier on a mapmaking career that spans 30 years and five continents, accepting any map challenge an art director might conceive, a travel magazine gig that led to an Australian passport, painting 100 birds for a wetland park, his favorite territory to illustrate, spending three months on a 3x4-ft. map of Bruges, why he never carries a sketchbook on a walk...

Utah artist Isaac Dushku on how a map has to evoke either a feeling of adventure or a feeling of home, the best- and worst-selling states in his catalog (he drew all 50), taking his business Lord of Maps from being ghosted on Facebook Marketplace to supporting his family, creating a board book of America’s highest peaks with a “ridiculously complicated” printing process, why your choice of labels...

Urbanist and illustrator Sam Usle on designing human-scale communities and rendering them in watercolors, why theme parks reflect a yearning for human-scale towns, redesigning part of his high school campus before graduation, why you can thank Le Corbusier for hideous Revit-default cities, the axonometric map that sold Disneyland, storytelling with facades, the history of Rome’s urban fabric, why...

Naomi Rosenberg , assistant director of the Media and Accessible Design Lab at San Francisco’s LightHouse for the Blind, discusses the art of making fingertip-readable maps: why clutter is the enemy of good tactile maps, the quest for an affordable embosser, being locked to 24 pt. type, creating large-scale accessible maps for the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, the OSM-filtering behind thei...

New Haven architectural designer and artist Matthew Dean Shaffer on balancing accuracy with art, taking a break from straight lines to draw birds, software-driven homogeneity in American architecture (“Straight-out-of-Revit, as we say”), why he draws the vegetation last, how anything’s better for the urban fabric than a surface parking lot, and sacrificing for one’s maps (he went cross-eyed for a...

Arlington “reformed architect” and pictorial cartographer Jamshid Kooros discusses his 30 years of mapmaking based on photographs, sketching and “walking, walking, walking,” the end of the drop-in pitch, turning three-week hikes into maps of French cities and castles, doing his own paper engineering for a pop-up map of Washington D.C., spending nine months on his Santa Fe map (which irked some loc...

Stafford cartographer and entrepreneur David Kulbeth on reviving old map aesthetics with his digital-to-copperplate-to-print-to-watercolor technique, the (costly) difference between copperplate etching and engraving, finding a custom papermaker, keeping his art affordable, finding style inspiration in 12 moving boxes of cartography books, and making high-craft maps of “modern places in an antique...

Fish Creek artist and gallery owner Sophie Parr on creating more than one hundred 0.5"-to-the-mile maps using aerial imagery and a 0.2mm-tip pen, why she only accepts 2x2" commissions (while working on her own 2x3 ft. map of Chicago), representing a variety of landscapes within the constraints of black ink, when returning a client’s deposit feels so good, why she won’t work in color, how...

Sandpoint cartographer Lee France on making his first topos in Chile, spending months on a single map for National Geographic Trails Illustrated , the challenge of making an attractive interactive map that includes every scale from hilltop to hemisphere, how an up-to-date cadastral layer can make or break your hunting map , how his team of technical cartographers at OnX maintains three discrete ma...

Atlanta visual artist, sculptor and “topophiliac”  Gregor Turk  on walking 250 miles of the U.S./Canada border, creating landscapes with clay, wood and recycled inner tubes, turning Landsat imagery into hundreds of hand-painted ceramic tiles, making 1:1 scale maps, chasing phantom streets, fighting real estate developers’ efforts to erase  Blandtown , confusing Beltline tourists with “misinformati...

Leesburg cartographer Tom Patterson on his decades creating visitor maps for the National Park Service (there’s a good chance his work is crumpled in your glovebox), learning to draw terrain by corresponding with an artist in Scotland, why he doesn’t lament the passing of 70s-era production techniques, how to map a piedmont glacier using satellite imagery, convincing the Park Service to give away...

St Leonards map producer/founder Melinda Clarke and Melbourne illustrator Deborah Young Monk discuss their collaborations across more than three decades, how to tell an artist they need to redraw three months of work, scouting territory by car, helicopter and hot air balloon, more than a week spent editing a 4x3 ft. map with a scalpel, selling maps door-to-door out of a suitcase, a very profitable...

Lewes/Berlin graphic artist and “exuberant mapmaker” Neil Gower on painting an estate plan when the grounds are unfinished, the work that gives him a “hum in the pelvis,” what Frank Zappa has in common with high-effort fake maps, an abandoned 5x5 ft. map of Venice that was more enjoyable to ground-truth than to draw, combining lunar toponymy with 1600s Italian map style, a trip to Barcelona on Con...

New York City cartographer and QueensLink chief design officer Andrew Lynch on using library archives, train-mounted GoPro footage and his own two feet to plot every track in the New York City subway system, a brush with cubicle-based urban planning at the Port Authority, testy-yet-productive correspondence with railfans, the unshakable authority conveyed by the Google Maps style, how your cartogr...

New Brunswick embroidery artist Danielle Currie discusses her fans among NASA’s Ocean Processing Group, spending more than 400 hours to render an Icelandic river in straight stitches, her hoops being mistaken for paintings, how you really have to enjoy the colors of a piece you’ll hold in your lap for months, pricing herself out of her own art, and not accepting commissions because “they’ll get it...

Toronto architect and artist Gabriel Camus discusses the 20" wide, 20 ft. long imagined cityscape he’s been drawing since 2018, a 100 ft. (!) illustration he's never seen the whole of for want of space to roll it out, the modern city as utopia/dystopia, how saying you study architecture can deflect rude questions about your street photography, the pleasures and hassles of walking in anti-...

Königs Wusterhausen mapmaker Simon Polster discusses falling into his first topo mapping project after hitchhiking from Iran to Berlin, using Soviet topographic maps as a starting point to map Armenian hiking trails, donating data to OpenStreetMap , the eternal method of “play around with it ‘til it looks okay,” completing most of his map layouts in QGIS, spending hours in the map shop inspecting...

East Yorkshire artist-cartographer Kevin Sheehan discusses picking a fight with fellow history PhDs by drawing a 19x29” calfskin portolan chart of the Mediterranean, spending 2 months stippling the lunar surface with a dip pen, acquiring a novel accent after 20 years in England, heated conversations with flat earthers over his map of the moon, how to make your own 1400s-style transfer paper with c...