Artwork of Mary Edna Fraser

Those who have read this blog over the years know that I love the intersection of art and cartography. One of my recent discoveries is artist Mary Edna Fraser. Her textile work (from silks to rugs) and paintings range from the continental scale,

East Coast, US-batik on silk

to the local scale.  

Edisto (South Carolina) -Batik on Silk

She has done some stunning works depicting hurricanes such as this one

Hurricane Season-batik on silk

Her rugs are also very nice.

Ashley River

She helped organize a civic art and event-based discussion on rising sea levels that included this banner hung on the Joseph Floyd Manor in Charleston, South Carolina showing NOAA predicted flooding in the area.

Her work has been commissioned by government agencies, non-profit organizations, universities, hospitals and other companies around the world. Her main artist page is here where you can get lost in the wealth of examples.

Huge Lego Model of the Lake District

Artist Jon Tordoff has made a 100 square foot, 200,000 piece (so far) Lego model of England's Lake District.

via Getty Images

 The model began as a pandemic recreation map of Buttermere, his favorite spot. 

"Now I've come over the Honister Pass, up Borrowdale and I've got Derwent Water heading towards Keswick now in the next valley," he said.

The model will be displayed at the Belper Library in Derbyshire (just north of his home in Milford) on January 6th and 7th.

All quotes and images taken from this BBC article where you can read more.

Middle Constellation

Middle Constellation is a schematic imagining by Jug Cerović of China's cities as a constellation of stars. It is available as a book, both in hard copy and ebook format. The book shows you how to draw the constellation in "8 simple movements".

The constellation is centered on Wuhan, a city infamous for pandemic reasons but also central to the populous east of China.

Draw lines between Beijing in the north and Shenzhen (the center of an urban agglomeration that includes Hong Kong and Guangzhou) in the south, and then between Chengdu in the west and Shanghai in the east. These lines will intersect at Wuhan. The beginning animation at top shows the geographic distortions that need to be made for schematic purposes.

Eventually more cities and connecting lines are added and the drawing is finished with a nice simplified curvy coastline.

Here is a picture of how it looks in hard copy.

While available for sale Cerović also generously allows you to the whole thing in pdf format on the project page.

Thirty Day Map Challenge - Part 1

 Several years ago Finnish cartographer Topi Tjukanov began the Thirty Day Map Challenge and it has run every November since. The idea is to create a map every day of November based on a theme he posts at the start. These maps are posted to Twitter using the hashtag #30DayMapChallenge. There have been some wonderfully inspiring maps created in this process. I had never participated before this year, correctly assuming it would take up a major part of my time and energy. 

As in other years, I had no plans to do this but on November 1st I suddenly found myself making a map and it took off from there. At the risk of being a self-indulgent show off here are the first 10 maps. As of right now I don't have an online portfolio so here is a place for me to post them. I'm hoping to continue on this challenge but time will tell if I make it to the 30-day mark.

Day 1 - Theme: Points

I'd been working on a general "where I've been" map and I got to thinking about places I've spent the night. I looked at a few states that either didn't seem interesting or had too many uncertainties when I settled on Ohio. I've been working on my weak artistic skills. This was drawn in watercolor pencils by hand while looking at a map of the state.

Day 2 - Theme: Lines

 I don't really like the song "Every Day is a Winding Road" by Sheryl Crow, but somehow it got stuck in my mind and I set out prove it. I used various mapping services such as Google, Bing, Apple and OpenStreetMap to illustrate examples of streets around the world named for the days of the week. One of the tricky parts was finding streets that are in fact "winding."

Day 3 - Theme: Polygons

Points, lines and polygons are the main building blocks of maps so each one gets a day. DC seemed like a good polygon city. I used Opendata DC to get my points. I removed some tiny triangles and it's possible I missed a few circles and squares. There are many rectangular parks that I didn't include because they don't have "square" in their name. I almost forgot about the Ellipse! 

This was a mixed media project. I made and printed a map using QGIS annotated it with pencils and put a little watercolor into the rivers.

Day 4 - Theme: Hexagons

Hexagons are a popular way to represent grids these days. Studies show that certain patterns are easier to detect with a hexagon grid than a square grid. They are particularly popular with election maps but I was looking to do something a little more creative. Not many things in nature are hexagonal. Bee hives use that shape but that kind of map has been done by many others.  While looking for inspiration, I discovered that some of Annie's Snack Crackers are hex shaped, including their saltines and cheddar crackers. I decided to use them as my hexagons.

    So where is a place that has both salt and cheese production? I settled on upstate New York, knowing where some of these places are located. The salt areas are mostly based on an old map I found showing salt deposits, mostly in the southwest. I also know of a couple of salt facilities from my travels so I put those in. I used the term "more likely" to cover the uncertainties but some of those hexagons in the southwest should probably be cheese. The cheese areas were determined by a combination of dairy farm maps and places I know that make cheese.

Day 5 - Theme: Data Challenge 1: OpenStreetMap

For the uninitiated, OpenStreetMap (OSM) is like Wikipedia meets Google Maps. Content is all user generated and it is freely available to use. Despite having contributed to OSM in the past, I don't have a lot of experience using the data so this was definitely a learning exercise. I knew that you can get things like businesses out of it so I tried a query on business names. For some reason, the first word that came to me was "monkey" so I grabbed all businesses with monkey in the name. After seeing an empty South America, I decided to add Spanish and then to make it a bit more objective I grabbed the other three of the world's top languages. In the process this became as much of a linguistic map as anything. 

There are many translation issues here. French and Spanish have different masculine and feminine words and the Spanish words (mona, mono) are contained within many other words and names. My Hindi translation must have been especially off since all my results came from outside of India. Anyway I did what I could here.

Day 6 - Theme: Red

Getting personal here. This is a map of the town where I was born. I was nervously waiting my turn to perform some music on Zoom and parlayed that energy into drawing. Like #1 I tried this completely freehand, while looking at Apple Maps. I've only been through Red Bank as an adult on a train so I don't know the place at all. Someday I hope to visit. The river west of downtown is very wrong and there are other mistakes. Also the map monster and train station were poorly done.

Day 7 - Theme: Green 

Staying in the realm of the personal, Rittenhouse Square is around the corner from my grandmother's former building. As a child I enjoyed playing here, especially with the goat statue. I also lived in the area briefly as an adult. I'd been thinking about how the same places look in different map services so I made an animation of the square using Apple, Google, Bing, Mapbox, Carto, Esri, Stamen, Mapquest, OSM and the philly.gov web site.

Day 8 - Theme: Blue

I started out trying to get a list of blueberry names using the Day 5 OSM theme but the results were not great. Next, I tried using the Google Maps API but also had issues with that. Finally, I found an embedded Google Map from travel-mi.com. I wasn't planning on a Michigan focus but because the data set was there I went with it. I already had a blueberry symbol from my What They Drop on New Years Eve map so I was good to go!

Day 9 - Theme: Monochrome

I thought one of those solar potential maps would look good in monochrome but I'm not sure it works. I also thought that light should be more sun but usually darker means more so this ends up being a bit counterintuitive. I also was not really able to get the subtle gradations of grays with a watercolor pencil. I probably should have tried charcoal instead. I don't trust my drawing abilities to do a complicated outline like this freehand. I traced it right off the computer screen. The rest was done freehand, making it "charmingly inaccurate". 
 

Day 10 - Theme: Raster

I made a very low resolution version of a satellite image of Australia. Then I made a fuzzy version. I couldn't decide which I liked better so I made an animation: blocky vs fuzzy

Though this challenge has taken up way too much of my time and thinking process, it has also been a creative inspiration and a great learning experience so far. I'm looking forward to some of the upcoming challenges with a touch of dread but also excited to take them on.

Mapping the Dream

For many years I had a recurring dream where I am exploring a non-existent neighborhood in Philadelphia. Despite its non-existence, it had very clear geographic parameters within West Philadelphia's University City area. I would take the subway westbound to approximately 33rd Street, walk through the area passing all the interesting urban things (coffee shops, clothing, book and record stores) that mostly don't exist there and get back on somewhere in the 40-something streets to go home. The picture in my head is clear enough that I decided to draw it.

I left the street names off of the drawing because they were not in the dream. The area breaks free of the grid pattern in interesting ways, revealing my anti-grid bias. Also in the dream I'm taking an underground subway whereas in reality it comes out of the ground and becomes a surface streetcar. This is what the area really looks like via a SEPTA map. The Baltimore Avenue trolley line is the closest thing to this subway. 

Using some photo manipulation I altered the map to the dream reality. I moved Baltimore Avenue northwards because I pictured the subway line as a direct continuation from 33rd Street.

Here is an animated comparison of reality vs. dream

Keep on dreaming!

More Cross Stitch Maps

 One of the talks I enjoyed at this month's North American Cartographic Information Society Conference was from Kara Prior, who uses maps to create cross stitch pattern designs - on sale on her Etsy shop.

She details the process in her talk - now available on YouTube. The idea is to take a map and make it as low resolution as possible while still conveying information. That way you see the individual squares. Here is a screen shot from the video illustrating this.

One of my favorites is the bedrock geology of Arizona. The colors really jump out - some of them look like they were taken from the state's flag.

 

She also has bathymetry and watersheds as well as several other, non-map patterns. The watersheds can be quite simple such as New Jersey,

or much more complicated.

I'll end with some bathymetry examples

Art Maps-Elizabeth Person

This week is getting away from me so here is a quick post showing the map art of Elizabeth Person, based in northwest Washington.

 

There's a lot more to discover on her Etsy page.

The NACIS 2020 Quilt

Last month I attended my first conference of the North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS). One of their traditions is to create a Map Quilt. This year, in honor of the society's 40th anniversary the quilt was made up of submissions from past NACIS presidents. The theme is Milwaukee- where NACIS is headquartered.

Alex Tait

Each quilt square is another take on mapping Milwaukee. Here are some examples - many interesting approaches to the same place.

Tanya Buckingham

Henry Castner

Erik Steiner

Keith Rice

James Meacham

The Maps of Pauline Baynes

Pauline Baynes was best known as a children's book illustrator. Her work on some of the most well known maps of the fantasy genre is less well known. She illustrated maps of Tolkien's Middle Earth and C.S. Lewis' Narnia.

Map of Narnia for Puffin Books U.K., 1972

After studying design at the Farnham School of Art, she started illustrating children's books. During World War II she joined the Women's Voluntary Service and eventually began making maps and nautical charts for the Royal Admiralty in Bath. This cartographic training served her well through her career. Her work was shown to J.R.R. Tolkien who was dissatisfied with his original illustrator for Farmer Giles of Ham. He was delighted with her work and hired her to illustrate the book.

Map for Farmer Giles of Ham-Pauline Baynes

Through Tolkien she got to know C.S. Lewis and was hired to illustrate and map his Chronicles of Narnia series.

1998 Narnia right book end sheet-via Peter Thorpe

Baynes made a color map of Middle Earth published in 1970. Tolkien supplied her with various charts he made and annotated a map his son had produced for The Fellowship of the Ring in 1954. The annotated map was recently discovered inside Baynes' copy of the books. 

More details on this map can be found here. The finished product is below.

A little nice detail, including the cartouche.

To see more maps and artwork visit her tribute site.