You get what you pay for: professional cartographer Evan Applegate interviews better cartographers. Listen to the best living mapmakers describe how they create worlds in pixels, ink, graphite, threads, film, paint, ceramic, wood and metal. For show notes and bonus content visit https://veryexpensivemaps.com
https://veryexpensivemaps.com
Gesamtlänge aller Episoden: 1 day 13 hours 54 minutes
episode 25: Simon Polster: “I was hitchhiking from Iran to Berlin and spent quite a long time in the Caucasus.”
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 good topos, and turning order fulfillment into a geography lesson for his kid...
episode 24: Kevin Sheehan: “There’s something good about using old ways of doing things.”
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 candle soot, and how “there’s something good about using, or at least trying, old ways of doing...
episode 23: Jeff Clark: “Paper maps are dead, long live paper maps.”
Vancouver “accidental cartographer” Jeff Clark discusses his 100-layer 18-month project to map the Salish Sea bioregion, the importance of testing your waterproof trail map paper, getting a big boost from the local press, the eternal hassle of bathymetric data, consulting North America’s best reference mapmakers, and when to call a map finished (never.) See his work at https://www.clarkgeomatics...
episode 22: Anthony Despalins: “I feel this energy when creating impossible landscapes, spaces, configurations.”
Lisbon cartographer and artist Anthony Despalins on using the visual language of French 1:50k topos to create imagined landscapes, a toolkit of pencils, poems, markers, memories and ink, drawing inspiration from the Gironde estuary and Matthew 6:9, sketching entire layouts in reverse on tracing paper, chasing altered states while creating worlds, and “living in every inch of the maps” he draws. See his work at https://instagram...
episode 21: Grant Preller: “It started as a fun project and has turned into something I would definitely call a vocation.”
Margaret River cartographer and surfer Grant Preller on catching waves down the Iberian coast in a 1980 VW bus, spending five years on foot marking promising breaks along 50 miles of Australian coastline, relating local history with maps, the plan to map ‘til “the end of [his] days,” and using Google Earth, 1890s coastline maps, 1:50k topos, the local library, an A0 sheet of paper, a pencil and CorelDraw to create an 8-foot map that shows you where to catch a sick barrel ????...
episode 20: Aaron Taveras: “I would stare at topos for days on end and thought it’d be fun to make them myself.”
Reno cartographer and outdoorsman Aaron Taveras on why he started making his own trail maps, “taking [his] sweet time” to create a hyper-detailed monochrome 4x5’ map of Nevada landforms, beginning a map with the raster data, an inspiring backcountry ski atlas, teaching cartography by disassembling National Park maps, and the beauty of low-amenity public lands. See Aaron’s maps at cartografix...
episode 19: Jake Coolidge: “It’s a great way to learn a place, to try to map it well.”
Redwood City cartographer and artist Jake Coolidge on making maps the hard way with ink, graphite, a metal scribe, copper, wax and ferric chloride, the difference between in silico and in vivo cartographic generalization, creating novel projections with two-point perspective, learning to letter backwards, training the eye before you train your mouse hand, how a mapmaking process will teach you something about the landscape, and his efforts to combine the handmade with the digital...
episode 18: Daniel Coe: “Science and art can make these really interesting images.”
Olympia cartographer and graphics editor Daniel Coe on his journey from Alaska sea kayak guide to geomorphology storyteller, what you learn in an office (and family) full of geologists, getting laid off and traveling the world for a year, how the paths of ancient glaciers shaped his neighborhood, the hidden landscapes revealed by infrared laser pulses, and how a few minutes at work adjusting one color ramp seeded hundreds of beautiful river images. See his work at dancoecarto...
episode 17: Anton Thomas: “That mix of serious cartography and serious art; I love that.”
Nelson artist-cartographer Anton Thomas discusses his travels from Utah to the Himalayas, creating “that mix of serious cartography and serious art,” logging his drawing time with a stopwatch, collecting photo references for 1,500 species, how drawing the little cartouche map-within-a-map can get out of hand, and closing on three years of work to finish his 40x24" map of the world. See his work at antonthomasart...
episode 16: Nat Slaughter: “I seem to be drawn to maps that have a timeless quality.”
Cupertino cartographer, designer and artist Nat Slaughter on using hardcore wildlife survey techniques to count squirrels with Jamie Allen, putting sound installations in shipping containers, the two years of shoe-leather data collection that went into his 5x2’ Central Park map, his desire to walk from Basel to the North Sea, how a one-hour deadline can have (occasionally) sublime results, and an 800-year-old map that feels like it was created yesterday. See Nat’s work at thesquirrelcensus...