{"id":798,"date":"2010-06-20T15:26:26","date_gmt":"2010-06-20T21:26:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/?p=798"},"modified":"2010-06-20T15:26:26","modified_gmt":"2010-06-20T21:26:26","slug":"map-progress","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/?p=798","title":{"rendered":"Map Progress"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here’s the current state of the map.\u00a0\u00a0 I’m about ready to pull the undersheets of details to be transferred and continue with the empty spots.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Those elongate bits in the “empty corner” are salt lake remnants that will be flanked by ranges of mountains eventually.\u00a0\u00a0 Kolobia is off the map to the left.\u00a0\u00a0 Eventually I’ll do another map of the “in between” but not anytime soon.<\/p>\n

I had the chance this week to initiate another person into the wonders of Rapidograph pens…we’ll see how he does.\u00a0\u00a0 Young artists learn all sorts of bad\u00a0 habits (including\u00a0 an inflexible grip) from using ballpoints and rollerballs and whatever else they have for school.\u00a0\u00a0 Whereas, once you’ve become proficient with a Rapidograph, most other technical and art pens are easy (leaving aside pure old-fashioned engineering-drafting pens like ruling pens…my mother insisted that I do all my borders with ruling pens, not Rapidographs, for the discipline of it.<\/p>\n

Yikes in a bucket.\u00a0 I don’t know how many circles I drew with the compass fitted with ruling pens before I got one that was “right.”\u00a0\u00a0 How many corners I had to practice before my corners looked like her corners: crisp, perfect meetings of the lines with no little blips needing to be erased.\u00a0\u00a0 (She had an electric eraser that could, if you were very <\/em>careful, lift off the (ink.\u00a0 It would also eat right through drafting vellum, treated linen, or any other surface if you weren’t careful.) \u00a0 But if you learn that way, there are advantages.\u00a0\u00a0 If only I could think of some!\u00a0 Now I can tell the computer to draw a straight line any width I want, and there it is.<\/p>\n

Some years back, I was talking to a friend of my mother’s (then in her eighties) who had also been a professional draftsman about the advances in computer-assisted drafting.\u00a0\u00a0 She said (correctly) that CAD has no character–that before, she could spot the work of individuals in minute differences in style…that tiny differences in the width of lines, the crispness of corners, the lettering, gave the work an artist’s touch.\u00a0 It was called “mechanical drawing” but it wasn’t entirely mechanical.\u00a0 And now it is.<\/p>\n

When I was designing the header art for the Paksworld website, I ran into this–in order to have it scalable in digital form, I could not do some of the things I had wanted to do.\u00a0\u00a0 But I can do the maps as real maps, hand-drawn, and though parts of it are tedious, it’s a lot of fun to see my vision of the maps, not limited by some map-drawing-software’s ideas of what’s needed.\u00a0\u00a0 The imperfections are part of the charm (to me, anyway.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here’s the current state of the map.\u00a0\u00a0 I’m about ready to pull the undersheets of details to be transferred and continue with the empty spots.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[109,5],"tags":[40,54,20,107],"class_list":["post-798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-artwork","category-the-writing-life","tag-artwork","tag-map","tag-progress-report","tag-the-writing-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/798"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=798"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/798\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":800,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/798\/revisions\/800"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}