Call for maps

As they do regularly, theydrawandtravel.com has issued a call for maps. As they put it, right now "most travel plans are a fantasy," so the new theme is "Out of This World," which consists of three options:

• An actual place: illustrate our solar system, the constellations, the path of a comet, or a trip to the moon
• A fictional place: draw a map of the setting from your favorite science fiction movie, series, book, or video game
• A fantasy place: conjure up an outer space dream from the depths of your imagination

I didn't find out about the challenge until yesterday, and the due date is August 30th, so initially I wasn't going to participate. I have many other things going on right now, and those maps typically have taken me as much as 40 hours of work apiece to do a preliminary sketch, find references, do a finished drawing, trace the drawing onto watercolor paper in pen, and do all the watercolor and lettering. That's basically every minute between now and 9 p.m. on August 30th!

But...I was drawn to option #2, being a science fiction kind of a gal, plus I've been on a roll during the month of August, working on all these wonky Deb Weiers projects, and thought it would be fun to incorporate some of my new techniques and materials—scribbling, dropping and merging Daler Rowney inks, using gel pens to elaborate, etc. So I decided that I would participate, but under specific rules for myself:

1. Their size requirement for submission is 16.667x6.25 inches. Have you ever tried to work that small when doing things by hand? The digital folks can work at any size they like, on-screen, and then output it at the proper proportion, but we hand-drawn people have to blow it up enough to get in all the little details. Previously when I have done these maps (or recipes for theydrawandcook) I have worked at half again the size, which is to say around 21 point something inches by 9.5 inches, which is a lot more doable. But for this one I decided I would work exactly to size, and keep my details simple enough to do so.

2. I am usually a planner and sometimes take weeks to decide what to include and how to arrange it all, but I decided to take another page out of Deb Weiers's book and be spontaneous. I had an idea for a couple of things to go in, so in they went, and then I just kept adding as inspiration struck. It's not nearly as detailed or complex as any of my other three, but I think it has atmosphere, at least.

I took as my theme a book that I think should be declared a classic and assigned in schools, due to the provocative philosophical and political conversations it sparks, as well as the fact that it's beautiful writing and a gripping story:  The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. LeGuin. I'm not sure exactly how many times I have read it, but at least three and probably five, and it never gets old. And I thought it would be ideal to use as the subject of a fairly simple yet hopefully profound visual expression in a map for the contest.

I didn't call it a contest before because they aren't picking winners or giving prizes, but they will be putting their favorites into a book at some point. I won't qualify for the book, though, because in my quest for spontaneity, I forgot the caveat they put on their website about not locating any text or important content in the middle 1.25-inch of the map, which will fall into the fold in any book set-up, and half of my title falls precisely there. Oh well...it was a fun project and will perhaps inspire others.

I had many challenges in the course of this, including not leaving white paper under the dancing girl, so that her outfit came out darker than I would have preferred; for the first time ever, I put a wash over the Uniball pen and it RAN (I can only blame the humidity, it should have been dry for hours), so I had to redo several parts of the lettering in different colors to hide that; and just the sheer challenge of doing lettering at size instead of being able to work larger and cleaner. But...spontaneity again, and I did my best to clean up all the screw-ups. And I have to say, it's a lot easier to match up two scans than it is four!

I used the Daler Rowney inks plus watercolor, gel pens, white and black gouache, collage (a page out of the book), and a border I liked from Deb's stuff. The rest is me. And the goddess, Ursula K. LeGuin.