This is from a job I did last summer with Bruce and Dixie Hornstein of Pyramid Studios for the Louisiana Childrens Discovery Center. They were tasked with creating a simulated balloon ride.
Being that the exhibit is geared towards kids 4 to 10 they wanted the illustrations to have a childrens book feel.
It was a rather large job that took the better part of the summer to complete. It involved drawing 3 large topographical maps, each one from a higher distance than the previous one. Each map had a different area that it focused on. The first being the immediate neighborhood around the museum itself.
Detail of Hammond area map.
The second was the larger surrounding metropolitan area and the last was the swamp-bayou-bay area. Being that they wanted the overall sensibility to have a kids book feel it gave me a bit of leeway when doing the maps. Having said that, the map of the Hammond neighborhood still required a lot of heavy lifting. In the process I became very familiar with google maps.
I was lucky enough to have an assistant on this job which is a very rare thing for me. Luckily Bruce and Dixie were aware of the amount of work involved and time allowed to execute it and allocated some of the budget for this. Originally my assistant, Lorna Yarberry was just going to lay in the flat colors but she asked if she could take a crack at applying some textures and modeling which knowing the time constraints we were working under I was more than happy to let her give it a shot. Lorna ended up doing a fantastic job, we worked very well together, her contributions ended up making this a much more mangable job.
While flying over one of these areas a window or view finder would pop up.
It was designed to have an industrial, steam punk sensibility. I'm not really sure why it had a steam punk vibe but it provided a nice break from the maps. On the left hand side of each view finder are 3 icon buttons, clicking on one would take you to a scene from that particular map. For instance the view finder that opens with the swamp has an icon of a Shrimp boat, a pelican and a tree. Clicking on one of the icons takes you to it's respective scene.
2 comments:
Wow! These are awesome. And that map! Are you a licensed cartographer by now or what?
Yeah, it required quite a bit of patience. Luckyily for me I had Lorna as an assistant. Truth be told she did much of the heavy lifting on the coloring of those maps. All I really had to do was come in and do some cleaning up. I don't know about a cartographer but I now know my way around Google Maps.
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