Friday, February 17, 2017

Lovecraftian Maps

We wrap up the week with a pair of handy Mythos maps.  The first is this very well done take on Arkham from cartographer Tullamareena
To compile this map, I worked with the original sketch of Arkham drawn by Lovecraft himself: www.cthulhufiles.com/arkham.ht…, and with another illustration that is an adaptation by a later author, Gahan Wilson: lovecraftzine.files.wordpress.…

I decided to go with a colored, basic, modern style illustration, as opposed to any thematic style. The hardest aspect of drawing this map was trying combine the two different scale styles used in the maps. I stuck with the scale of Lovecraft's original sketch, but I tried evaluating what would be an accurate value for the bar scale. The arrow indicating '1 and a half miles' on the bottom of the sketch seems ambiguous as to what length it refers to. It can't be the length of a single block; that is much too long. I ended up looking at some generic block dimensions of towns in Massachusetts and New Hampshire to determine the best scale distance. Minor things that I have added or changed myself, are adding a Town Hall in between Main Street and Church Street, shifting the Arkham station closer to the railway line, and adding a Christchurch Street by Christchurch Cemetery, as well as having two branching rail lines (left side of the map), where in many adaptations either one or the other route direction is depicted..


He was kind enough to link to this open source map of Lovecraft Country from artist Hoodinski. It's available through Wikimedia Commons as both a high resolution PNG (copied below) and the original SVG vector file.




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