My Color Palate For the Maps

Day 4 of Mapmaking

Be amazed. I drew in all of the mountains, hills and rivers and outlined the forests.

Day 3 of Mapmaking

I am beginning to add in forest and hills and erase the grid.

Day 2 of Mapmaking

I drew in the mountains and rivers in pencil.

Day 1 of Mapmaking

Today I gridded the map from the books (drawn by Christopher Tolkien) and then put a grid on the paper that I am drawing my general map on. I am in the process of drawing the coastline. I have a lot of work ahead because that took me a good three hours.

A Practice Map

Some More Terrain Sketches

Some Mountains and Hills

Some New Sketchbook Work

I experimented with shading and a new knot.

Maps in the "The Complete Tolkien Companion" by J.E.A. Tyler

These maps are cool because they show the progression of the event they are depicting. The borders are interesting but the actual geography is missing major elements.

Some Sketches

First stab at a compass

Some Self-Reflection

In this weekend's research I came across this little nugget of wisdom from an essay entitled I, Mercator by Stephen S. Hall that appears in the book You Are Here, Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination by Katharine Harmon.
"Someone recently asked me how I became interested in maps, and I suddenly saw myself as a young child sitting on the floor of a sun porch in the first home I remember, assembling a thick wooden puzzle of the United States, putting each state in its proper place. Before even becoming conscious of its lesson, I am sure the exercise imbued me with a sense of external order, with the idea that things belong in their proper place. It was a fiction, but an important fiction."
This may be what drew my to maps as well. As many of my friends can tell you, I am a huge believer in continuity (shout-out to Mr. Wolk). I like things to stay the same from day to day, because it gives me a sense of external order. That is why I like to sit in the same place in a class every day, and will not only get upset if someone sits in my seat, but also if someone around me moves. Even if nothing in my life is ever stable at least  I can feel like something is has an order. The idea of geography and borders as stable is however a fantasy. The world looks nothing like it did a few billion years ago and borders can change on a daily basis. Even in Middle Earth geography is not a stable thing. Places like Numenor  and Beleriand sink under the sea and are lost before Bilbo and Frodo are even born. But the idea that things look stable helps us get through the day.

The things I like in John Howe's Maps

Love the font!

Cool idea, the Gondor and Ork shields, maybe for the battle map.

Like the animal element of the borders.

I like the facing statues. It is like in the Fellowship.

Each corner of the map has the elvish symbol for the direction.

This could also be cool for the battles.

This is just awesome!

This could be a cool idea.

The other side of the battle.

The decay of the border is very symbolic.

Cool font.

An unconventional border but very visually intriguing.

The color is very rich.

The border is great.

This title box border is a good idea.

My initial stamp

Tolkien has a little symbol that appears somewhere on much of his work. It consists of his initials. I created one for myself with my initials. Plan to create a linoleum cut of it to print on my maps.