Time Drawn: February 2007
Add “Maps” to my ever-growing list of arty things I should do more of.
I love maps. I love poring through atlases, finding interesting twists of land or oddly named towns. I love the look of them, both ancient and modern. And, on a higher level, I love that they carry both beauty and knowledge.
Perhaps that’s why I have a minor in Geography. Now, part of it is just that my college didn’t have a Geology department and the classes about rocks got shoved in with that set. But really, Geology tends to be about the “what” of the earth – naming and locating rocks and features. While high-level Geography is about the “why”. Mind you, that’s not the “where”, though that is it’s focus in the entry levels of the field. But when you get to the college level, just knowing which particular mountain is the tallest (Mauna Kea, by the way) isn’t that important.
It’s much more about why this rock formation formed, or why these people settled here. At my school, they separated them into Physical Geography and Human Geography, and both were fascinating. AND they offered a Cartography course. Which I, of course, took.
Not that this particular map follows the guidelines I was taught in that class that closely. It’s more of a concept map, filled with notes and only roughly laying out what the land is like. Though I still used contour lines to mark height, and I used what I learned in the Physical Geology classes to lay out rain patterns and currents, while my Human Geography classes came in handy for locating towns and roads.
It’s from a long-defunct comic story my sister and I were working on together. It only got so far before we got distracted by school and other projects, but I still have art from it hanging around. I’m not likely to continue this story, which is why I don’t mind revealing my notes. Assuming you can read them anyway, I’ve got a bit of a chicken scratch style of writing, developed due to only needing to hand-write notes for myself where speed was of the essence, and it didn’t matter if anyone else could read it. Or if I could read it, for that matter. I rarely read my notes. I just needed to take them to get the kinesthetic memory going.
Which is part of why I can remember what each and every note on this map meant, even if I can’t read them and it has been five years since I made it. I just look at them, remember writing them, and bam, I know what it says without even having to read the whole thing. Kinda handy, that.
