Creating a virtual candlelight tour of the Washington Navy Yard

Architectural Reconstruction Project-Our assignment for this week was a recreate a historic neighborhood using a historic map overlaid on a Google Earth map. We were then to recreate some of the buildings in this neighborhood using Google Sketch-Up. I’ve spent the better part of a decade in one particular neighborhood, the Washington Navy [...]

No Sanborn love for military installations?

I’m a little frustrated with the historical reconstruction project due new week.  I’d love to recreate the Washington Navy Yard, circa 1890 or 1925.  Why those two time periods?  The Naval Historical Center has some great photographs and paintings from both of those time periods and I’ve never had a chance to work with them.  [...]

Building my dream house in Google Sketch-Up

Lots of fun in Google Sketch-Up this week.  I started out trying to recreate some of the buildings at Chatham Historic Dockyard in England .  I was there last fall and fell in love with the place.  I quickly became sidetracked though with all the fun tools that Sketch-Up has to offer and ended up [...]

The historical implications of rubber sheeting..

For my rubber sheeting assignment in History and Cartography (see previous post) I chose to look at Lexington Park, MD.  I spend two days a week in this little community in St. Mary’s Country, Maryland as it’s the home of the Patuxent River Naval Air Museum, which I’m currently the Acting Director of.  I hated [...]

It can’t be this easy…I must be doing something wrong…

…was the line that kept going through my head this weekend as I did the rubber sheeting project. Nothing in Prof. P’s class is ever easy for me (well, Photoshop was kinda easy, but only because I’ve worked with that for a decade) so I threw myself into this project hoping it would only [...]

cars, planes and aircraft carriers…

I’m back home…finally!  After a grueling week and a half in San Diego (I know, I shouldn’t be complaining…it was beautiful and sunny the entire time I was there) I made it back at about 3 am this morning an extension of what was only a week long conference to troubleshoot a problem at another [...]

preliminary mapping assignment

orginal-of-hand-drawn.jpg
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 [...]

mapping as a way to avoid doing the budgets

So I finally got Natural Scene Designer the other day, and while I wish I had the time to play with it just a little more, I did bring my laptop into work so my two co-workers could “ohhhh” and “ahhhhh” at all the fun tricks I can do now with map (I conveniently left [...]

Pencil or mouse…which provides better relief???

The relief shading exercise for this week provided lots of good practice in developing “the touch.”  To much or too little shading, the wrong size brush, mismatched coloring…all these factors can lead to a relief shading project a second grader would giggle at.  I tried printing the map out first and shading with the pencil, [...]

Reciepies for map makers

This is going to be short tonight.  For the past five days I’ve been told by my front office that “today is the last day toorder anything on this fiscal year’s budget.”  Everyday I scamble to get in what I can before the credit card holder leaves for the day, only to come back in [...]