Welcome to the guild! Thank you so much for your great work! Hope you find the perfect artist for the job
Hi all- Long time lurker and admirer of the work on here. I have been building and overseeing COVID Test Sites here in NW England since March 27, 2020. Tomorrow is my last day before 6 weeks off, and I wanted to commission a frame-worthy map to commemorate my time helping during the pandemic. I have no particular style in mind, but a decent budget to commission something for hanging up for posterity.
My Google Map is here: https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/ed...3O&usp=sharing.
I am not an artist, nor do I play one on TV, so all thoughts/styles would be welcome, happy to answer any and all comments publicly, and thank you in advance for your thoughts/ideas, even if you do not wish to take the commission.
Cheers,
JC
Hi there JC,
Sounds like you deserve that time off chief! I do hand-drawn maps, and my portfolio is here: https://www.ryansthomason.com/Mapmaking/. If my style suits, I can be reached at ryan@ryansthomason.com.
Hey JC,
Thanks for all your hard work during the pandemic!
I have a variety of styles in my portfolio here so if you like the look of any and want to discuss options further, I can be contacted at ifirix-at-gmail-dot-com
Thanks both for replying, and you both have amazing work. My first concern is that the area I covered is pretty vast, and there are 100+ sites on my Google Map I'd want to capture. Most of your maps appear to be majority color and design, minority places/names. That is awesome, but I am concerned that putting in 100+ place names or even logos with numbers (the LTS/RTS number and/or date perhaps) would be difficult to work in?
Any thoughts about how that could be overcome? Size? Colour? Blow-outs for places like Manchester and Liverpool which have 5+ sites?
I could make a map for you. Of course I have a fantasy map portfolio which has my fancy art in it that you can check out, but I have a secondary mapping skill set that would adapt to what you want well.
1) I know how to get and work with the actual data for northern UK, so you can have an accurate map of the region based on its current data.
2) I have made modern maps with many, many data points. I'm actually working on one now. I don't tend to drop them into my portfolio because they're not my biggest selling feature but I've made multiple maps that are "a modern location with a high density of points of interest"
This is one I'm working on right now with 43 points of interest that will be noted on it, made with OSM street data, for an upcomining non-fiction book about Windsor Ontario's history.
windsor-text2-sepia.jpg
Could probably come up with something that lies between this "non-fiction" map style I use for non-fiction books for Canadian publishers, and the fancy fantasy art maps. My solution is to do an inset if one area has too high of an amount of legend nodes to be legible, like I did for this map, for a non-fiction book called 100 Miles of Baseball, where there were just too many nodes in the Detroit region requiring an inset to show it properly.
100 miles of baseball map.jpg
Of course these aren't my fanciest maps by a longshot, but they do both manage quite a lot of data on a contemporary street map. We can probably meet in the middle, by adding stylization appropriate to a more fanciful map if that's your desire, instead of modern fonts and simpler designs suitable to academic non-fiction.
Click my banner, behold my art! Fantasy maps for Dungeons and Dragons, RPGS, novels. No obligation, free quotes. I also make custom PC / NPC / monster tokens.
Contact me: calthyechild@gmail.com or _ti_ (Discord) to discuss a map!
Thanks chief! For your map, I'd distort the scale slightly to focus on the Manchester-Liverpool area, with blow-outs if necessary. I just did a count on the first map in my portfolio, and there's just a little more than a hundred placenames in there, so I'm confident that size of paper would work for you too.
So I was thinking on this further, and these are the other historical maps from places I served in the Foreign Service, and I think if something like this could be done it would be super, I note the Jamaica map from the 1700's seems very much like a fantasy map!
IMG_5415.JPGIMG_5414.JPGIMG_5413.JPGIMG_5412.JPGIMG_5411.JPGIMG_5410.JPGIMG_5409.JPG