The Art of Map Illustration (Artistry)

by James Gulliver Hancock, Hennie Haworth, Stuart Hill, and Sarah King

[Quirky Cat]

I received a copy of The Art of Map Illustration in exchange for a fair and honest review.

I’ll be honest with you, I don’t know much about mapmaking, but I was really curious and wanted to try and learn at least a little bit about the subject. The Art of Map Illustration is a perfect novel for getting your toes wet, so to speak.
For being an introductory sort of book it was surprisingly comprehensive, pulling in artists using multiple methods and styles. Four artists are included, and each one focused on different elements, ways to render the artwork, and what they felt was most important.
Hennie Haworth showed us some of his hand drawn maps and the techniques he used. He also covered the basics of map making (like what you’d see on a map besides the most obvious bits).
Stuart Hill makes his maps digitally, and he gave us a pretty good understanding of what was involved for that process. He had a lot of fun examples that helped to show the difference in results for hand drawn versus digitally drawn.
James Gulliver Hancock appeared to use more of a blend between digital and hand drawn. His work has a digitized look to it while not being quite as ‘clean’ as being fully digitally rendered. I actually really enjoyed the end results for his work in particular. He also had fun doing more unique works, like the solar system and things of that nature.
And last there’s Sarah King. Her work is hand drawn, but she does things in a completely different way from Hennie Haworth. Her pieces had more details in the drawings – the lines almost becoming a texture in themselves.
This was a really fun introduction for map making. I had failed to realize how much went into maps besides just the map itself, but this novel opened my eyes to that fact. I really enjoyed each artist’s unique style for creating their maps, and having a good example of different styles helped me to understand the major points they were trying to get across.

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