6 replies to this topic

[Nick Springer]

Map was used as the frontspiece for a novel by Neal Stephenson, "The Confusion" published by HarperCollins. Created in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop using 2-colors.

 Confusion_West.gif   785.85K   346 downloads

[bluecrog]

Hi my name is Gavin. I am just new to Carto Talk and I looked at your picture of Europe in 1680. I thought it was a brilliant picture. I live in Europe and I would like to see more. Could u help me to find more pictures of Europe.

[Nick Springer]

If you are looking for actual antique maps of Europe, a good place to start is the David Rumsey collection:

http://www.davidrumsey.com/

[Kartograph]

Map was used as the frontspiece for a novel by Neal Stephenson, "The Confusion" published by HarperCollins. Created in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop using 2-colors.

Hello !
I´m a geography/cartography/GI student from Berlin, Germany.
Coluld you explain what steps were done with which program ? I´m quite good with freehand an the like (some of my maps have been published this year, hooray! ) , but don´t know that much about producing old looking maps. I know abot layers and the general tools of photoshop, but can´t figure out how you did it.

Regards,
Andreas

[Nick Springer]

Well, I can't give away all my secrets

I can tell you the overall process though. The coastlines, gridlines, hydrology and modern cities were projected in ArcGIS and then exported to Adobe Illustrator format. In Illustrator I added modified the cities to match the historical setting (and places mentioned in the book) and added the historical boundaries by hand.

I exported the coastlines and historical borders as seperate layers to Photoshop (I hide the layers I don't want to export and then use Illustrator's Export function to create a high resolution layered PSD file).

I then created blurs for the coastlines and borders, and added a faint pattern in the water to mimic the look of parchment paper. The hardest thing was figuring out how to achieve the look of the multiple pen strokes coming out from the edges of the coast. I knew what I wanted but getting there took some time, and it's way too detailed to get into here, but in general I created a blur, and then converted it a copy to a line screen by changing the mode to Bitmap and then reimporting it back to my PSD file.

The final greyscale PSD file was then reimported and the color was applied in Illustrator. The actual coastline and boundary paths remained as vectors in Illustrator.

Hope that helps.

[Kartograph]

Thanks a lot !

Do you use the free shapefiles ESRI offers for that kind of work, or can you buy better ones and charge your customer ?

Regards,

Andreas Reimer

[Nick Springer]

For this map I was able to use the Digital Chart of the World data since it was a small scale map and I didn't need a lot of detail.

For other projects requiring more detail, I either get permission to use public domain data from government sources for commercial purposes, or purchase a data set. If you purchase a set you should try and get the customer to pay for some or all of the costs. This is why it is important to do some up front research before quoting a price to a client. Clients hate to be surprised with "there is an additional $1,000 for the data."