"Hey! You got cartography in my art!" "You got art in my cartography!"

December 17, 2019 9:18 AM

Anton Thomas, an artist and cartographer from New Zealand, has drawn a very big cartoon map of North America.

The map began as a sketch on a refrigerator. The final version was drawn between May 2014 and February 2019. Over the course of the project, the style and substance changed so much that one entire year was spent redrawing the western US and Canada.

Now it is a big finished map! If you like, you can watch some videos about the process. Or you can read in more detail about how certain places were illustrated, like Nevada, or Cuba, or even more about Cuba, or the triple divide (where Arctic, Pacific, and Atlantic drainages meet). There are more pictures on his Flickr.

It is a big map!

Illustrated maps: Previously and more previously.

posted by compartment (13 comments total)

My first impression was, wow, what a gorgeous map! Such detail! The stylized cartouche! But the more I look at it and read the details about how the different places were illustrated, the more amazed I am by Thomas's research, decisions, and attention to detail.

Also, I like the little animals sprinkled throughout.
posted by carrioncomfort at 9:47 AM on December 17, 2019

I like that it has some of the stylistic elements of those horridly designed cartoon maps of tourist areas that show attractions while retaining elements that make it cartographically sound. New Jersey could use a few more trees in the northern part of the state, but, hey, he got the Pine Barrens right.
posted by mollweide at 9:54 AM on December 17, 2019

I was very interested to find out which projection he was using, and digging in he said it was Google Earth zoomed out. So earth as seen from space, basically.
posted by clawsoon at 10:21 AM on December 17, 2019

But "cartography" already has "art" in it.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 10:37 AM on December 17, 2019 [1 favorite]

He even put in a vaquita in the Sea of Cortez! Hardly anyone even knows what a vaquita is! I love him!
posted by WalkerWestridge at 10:40 AM on December 17, 2019 [1 favorite]

Ooh, I like the South Asia and Australia map as well.
posted by ChuraChura at 10:42 AM on December 17, 2019 [1 favorite]

aw, this is cool! Anton is a pal, he's a terrific guy, and it's thrilling to see his hard work getting such positive attention. The videos linked in the FPP are from annual meetings of NACIS, the North American Cartographic Information Society. If you like maps, definitely go through their youtube channel. But at least watch his - they're always some of the most interesting and engaging sessions. He's also brought a full sized copy of the map to the conference and it is spectacular, the details are so rich and well researched.
posted by everybody had matching towels at 11:28 AM on December 17, 2019 [3 favorites]

...he apparently completely omitted Oakland. Modesto and Visalia made the map, but not Oakland.

What's there may be detailed, but there are clearly some massive omissions.
posted by Lexica at 11:36 AM on December 17, 2019

There is (or maybe was?) a really cool old map store in downtown Denver. I spent at least an hour in there when I visited the city for a work conference a few years ago. I purchased a map of my current state of residence printed some time in the early 20th century (it's at home and I am not so I cannot check). It's one of those funny tourist maps with bright colors and cartoony images everywhere but I was really impressed with some of the small details that would be really easy for someone who doesn't live here to overlook. My favorite detail is a few small buildings from a local museum that are included on the map; these buildings have a very distinctive and important design relating to their original purpose and they're faithfully represented in a slightly cartoony way that preserves their layout and function. It's a level of detail I didn't expect and it showed that the artist(s) did some genuine research and work into what is superficially a silly, inauthentic map.
posted by ElKevbo at 12:43 PM on December 17, 2019 [2 favorites]

Jaw --> Floor.

Amazing detail, and I'm reiterating others, but the background research is astonishing.

This is both deep and broad, I can forgive the oversights - especially from someone who isn't based in NAmerica.
posted by porpoise at 4:48 PM on December 17, 2019

My foolish nitpick is that the Seattle skyline is presented from the north, so that the space needle is in the front, but I feel like the orientation of the map implies you're looking from the south.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 6:48 PM on December 17, 2019

Clawsoon, the techy name for the projection is ”azimuthal orthographic”
posted by tomp at 11:39 PM on December 17, 2019 [1 favorite]

Everybody had matching towels: Thank you for commenting in this thread! That's so cool. As someone who (I think?) is a cartographer/GIS person, could you comment on how you see Thomas' work from a professional perspective? As a non-cartographer, I associate his work with illustrated tourist/travel maps from the 1920s to the 1950s, but it also reminds me of certain outsider art, where, as a viewer/non-specialist, one of the most impressive things to me is how the finished product so obviously shows the incredible amount of work that went into it.

I love the revisions to Arizona. I appreciate that he removed errant saguaro cacti from Northern Arizona, where they don't grow, and I love the addition of the coyote along the Colorado River below Hoover Dam.

For those who have tiny criticisms of the great big map, please do go check out the linked videos. It addresses some types of criticism brought up here. I don't recall precisely, but I think there was a bit of a formula involved in selecting which cities appeared on the map, in terms of both population and nearness to other population centers. When Thomas posted an early version to Reddit, residents of Forth Worth were upset that that the DFW area on the map was just "Dallas" ... and he was confronted with the reality that no specific formula could do a good job across all circumstances or places. (Fort Worth I think got added in during the year-long re-draw.)

The videos also describe how inked-in details were removed during the re-draw with the help of knives, and the corresponding importance of using good, thick paper. The videos are suuuuuuper awesome.
posted by compartment at 8:35 AM on December 18, 2019 [1 favorite]