The Illustrator Map that I created for this assignment was done from Commodore Joshua Barney’s map of the battle of St. Leonard’s Creek during the War of 1812. As you can see from the original, there’s more to the map. As I spent 15 hours working on just the portion you see though, I decided against tackling anything further. This map has great hand-drawn/hand-written qualities that I worked to preserve in a digital format. I couldn’t find a font exactly like Barney’s so I chose something close to a 200-year-old formal script.
The hand drawn map is a scaled up (double the original) map of an officer’s birth on a turn of the century cargo hold. I used this particular map to practice for my final project where I’d like to map HMS Belfast’s interior as she looked in her last year of combat service and as they look as a Museum today. I’m fascinated by that way that ships can be transformed from vehicles of combat to educational facilities for the general public. HMS Belfast is one of the best examples of this genesis.
Abode Illustrator is a good lesson in humility. The Illustrator map that I’m attaching to this blog looks like a kindergartener did it, which is incredibly frustration as I spent hours working on it and tweaking my outlines. I’m at a conference in San Diego right now, which is actually the best thing that could have happened to me with regards to this project. I’m so caught up in running this conference that I just can’t spend any more time working on this map. Couple of things that I’ve learned and Illustrator that I did want to list in this blog though (before I run off to my “opening day reception”)
-Put the different aspects of your map project in different layers…just as you would in Photoshop. I also learned (the hard way) that just because a layer or property is highlighted, doesn’t mean it’s “active.” You have to click the on/off button to activate the layer
-Text will rotate, but not the way you rotate in Photoshop. At one point in this project I thought I’d cheat and save my Illustrator map as a PSD and import into Photoshop to get the test to rotate and skew the way I wanted. I thought better of that though, but would like to discuss how to work out the problem in class next week.
