Historical Line-Art Maps

[SteffenBrand]

Hey there!

I'm often working with line-art in maps, hand-draw what I want to show and try to include some extra-amount of information in the design of the map. I made this a while ago (see attachment) and wondered if there ever was a time / region when / where maps were drawn with line-art only in history...

der_fluch_des_drachengrafen__old_map__by_steffenbrand-d7oktor.jpg

Do you have any source material if this ever existed in real life?
Thanks for any help in advance! =)

[eishiya]

There are plenty of such examples, but I'm afraid this isn't the right place to post them. Try the Reference Material forum.

If you want to find some examples on your own, googling for them is fairly easy - Image search for a (location) map (or just old map, or anything), and in the search tools, select Color -> Black and white. You'll likely find many modern outlines of the area, but you'll also likely see some old maps in B&W. You can also try the orange colour option, which will return some results on aged paper and photos of maps in museum lighting, along with modern climate and elevation maps. Here's one I found when googling in this way for Scandinavia map, it's a fragment of a B&W printing of the 16th century Carta marina, of which the most famous version is in colour.

Most historical European maps were printed in black (after being originally designed by hand, of course) and had colour added by hand later. In many cases, this colour consists only of a few border markings, and isn't required to understand the map fully, it's just there to draw attention to certain things. Even older maps were often designed/created with lineart and then coloured in, and lineart/B&W versions often exist, since they're cheaper to make. Some (perhaps many?) maps were even designed to be seen in B&W because that's all the cartographer ever saw of the map, the colour was added as a gimmick to fetch a higher price or because the buyer wanted it. You could try removing the colour from colour maps to see the underlying lineart better, this can be done with some Photoshop/GIMP trickery.