Massive hand-drawn map by artist and cartographer Anton Thomas. Working with pen and colored pencils over nearly five years, he spent nearly 4,000 hours creating this incredibly detailed continental landscape. Its an ambitious project full of Easter eggs waiting to be discovered. These include 600 individual city skylines, with thousands of details. Whether its local flora and fauna or symbolic signs of a city or monument, Thomas manages to draw just the right thing to set off each location.
Such a long painting cycle also means that Thomas' painting style will change over time. As he spent more time on the map, his skills improved. His superb skills also meant that much of the map had to be removed and redrawn to make the final product look even. In the end, all Thomas' hard work paid off. The completion of the map gave Thomas time in 2019 to start giving lectures about cartography and his maps at schools, universities and conferences.
Growing up in New Zealand, it is not difficult to be inspired by the local geography: the scenery is diverse and beautiful. Thomas remembers his first ride as a childWas hooked while flying between Nelson and Wellington. Every page of the atlas, every route map in the glove box of his mothers car, every bend of the coastline made him feel like he wanted to take risks.
When he was a teenager, he ignored his love of maps and instead took up playing guitar. The first big map he ever drew on the refrigerator was very interesting and he could see his progress every day. At the same time, friends will also spend a lot of time studying it carefully and use it to share their own life stories. It’s clear why – I’m painting real places. I’ve since discovered the power of cartography, the knack of making it a fascinating art form: place.
Maps change everything. It’s worth mentioning that he also had to work at his day job during most of the project, and it wasn’t until early 2018 that he started painting full-time. This is the main reason it took so long. He would come home from get off work and paint in the evenings, weekends and holidays. A task so daunting that sometimes he wondered if he was going crazy. But he loved hand-drawing like this, which taught him a lot, and thousands of hours of painting experience honed his patience.
By spending thousands of hours drawing on a single piece of paper (that is, a piece of original paper), a huge gap in quality between the old and the new products emerges. The divide became so vast that he chose to redraw vast areas (much of the western United States and western Canada). Scraping the fine lining paper from the paper was a painful and delicate process that lasted more than a year.
For weeks after it was completed, he didn't even know who he was. Hes been busy since the map was drawn, and has a lot to keep up with since it was completed. From image capture to printing, shipping, website building, e-commerce, marketing and more. His takeaway was that maybe you can make your hobby your career, but that doesn't mean you can always create all day long, sooner or later you're going to have to manage your own business.
There are many highlights on this map, but he was particularly fond of Cuba. Around the time I was painting Cuba, he started listening to music to match where I was painting. In addition to region-specific music, he also watches movies, listens to podcasts, and even goes out to sample local food and drinks, feeling like hes visiting the place.
The world is vast and complex, and any illustrated map is extremely simplified. Wherever he went, he tried his best to comeSolve it. He would plan as if he was planning a visit while searching the internet (photos, maps, Wikipedia, travel sites, blogs, news, etc.). Some symbols are easy to select (e.g., the Statue of Liberty in New York City, Chichén Itza in Yucatán), but at other times he might spend hours searching for clues.
Time log for drawing the map.
