The American Museum of Natural History went all-out for this one. They lent me a photographer and closed off a small exhibit to photograph a large modern globe. I then used the current conjectures to fashion where the ice age glaciers advanced and painted this with airbrushes.
Scholastic commissioned a "simple" map to illustrate the "not-so-simple" Korean War.
Here's an animated version of the Bering Land Bridge done for The Sharlot Hall Museum in Prescott AZ. The curator, Sandy Lynch, is a delight.
This was made using materials relayed from a 1927 expedition to find the site of the mysterious Tunguska Event. Their sketchy, conflicting descriptions made it difficult for me to reconcile with current maps. It was printed by Cambridge University Press.
The South Carolina edition of a Pearson textbook had a few features focusing on Black history. This illustrated the section on The Great Migration.
Every month for over 30 years, Bob Mohlenbrock has written an article about an interesting park or protected area. He focuses mainly on the flora, while I make a simple map. 350 of them have appeared in Natural History magazine.
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This map appeared in a Forbes travel feature. It's business travel, not vacation, hence the fishing and golf. I have no idea why the shipwreck, but I can personally attest to the Walleye fishing.
Forbes needed a very small locator map for a very short article.
I drew this map for Jamar J. Perry's YA novel, using his manuscript to puzzle out the spatial arrangement of the named places. In that sense it's similar to the early maps of discovery, drawn only from second-hand observations of the explorers.
After failing to film an actual burning map, I was surprised that I couldn't find a ready-made plugin for the classic Bonanza burning map title sequence. So, I made one myself.
Fredrik Miggins of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) commissioned this animation to illustrate their 600-plus affiliates.
This diagram was never used, but was intended to go with the Panama Canal article for Time For Kids.
Bob Clem is making a Civil War film Sink the Alabama. I'm making a few maps for it.
The Newark Museum of Art printed this one 15 feet wide on the wall as the centerpiece of an exhibition of photographs.
The author, Pamela Kenney Bassey asked me to make a map that expressed the tone of her novel, Mud Fever. It all takes place in the territory of Colorado in 1863. The Pike's Peak Gold Rush had just peaked. The Civil War was raging. Then there was a smallpox epidemic.
As you might guess from first glance, this was made to be a jigsaw puzzle. A closer look reveals the labels are all in Romanian. Bonus points if you knew that "Lunar" means "Monthly" in Romanian.
This was an illustration for the long-running series This Land in the November 2022 issue of Natural History Magazine. Bob Mohlenbrock writes the article and I make the map, once a month for over forty years and counting.
Military History Quarterly asked me to illustrate an article on Balkan history, focusing on the breakup of Yugoslavia. Seeing the underlying ethnicities beneath the political boundaries gives a good view of the actual divisions. The article explains how they got there in the first place.
There were thousands of enslaved persons in New Jersey as late as 1830. This map illustrates the U.S. Census data for that year and is a part of the Seeing America exhibit now on the walls of The Newark Museum of Art. It's a major effort of 16 museums to revise their collections of 18th and 19th century American art.
Red Chair Press wanted a "period" map to illustrate a YA novel set in 1940s London. 1940 is ancient history for middle school readers, but they might imagine their grandparents or great grandparents in the tale.
Knopf asked me to make a map for an historical novel set in the times before the Crusades. I imagined the style but used accurate modern geography to make a map that I thought could live in the book.
I made this map for Geotoys who made a jigsaw puzzle out of it. If you want to see the map you might have to spent some time putting the 500 pieces together.
Natural History Magazine printed this one in the early 90s. I had just gone digital.
Margaret Erskine's harrowing tale of abduction by Shawnee warriors in 1779 was well known in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries as the story found its way into all kinds of media. It was noticeably short on geographic detail as the area was then very poorly mapped. Ruth Greenstein commissioned me to string together the few vague references to real places and make a map for Sallie Bingham's soon-to-be-published book Taken by the Shawnee.
Red Chair Press asked me to make some maps for a books series on famous composers. This is the first one: alphabetically and chronologically: Bach.
If you've read any spy novels, you may be familiar with highlife in the capitals of Europe. The spies in Dominic Martel's tales are lowlife in the crummy neighborhoods of the world. You'll need a map to read these books. I made a few for Archelapelago Game published by Dunn Books.
The Khmelnitsky Uprising in 1648 destabilized the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and allowed Sweden and Russia to carve it up for themselves. Russia didn't give up their Ukrainian conquests until 1991.
This map features the starways and elevators of Madame Tussaud's Museum in Times Square. If you are wondering how to get the the 5th floor, I made that map too.
This map features the lower floors of Madame Tussaud's Museum . Both maps appear together on their web site and on opposite sides of the tour guide.
This is based on a map from the Maidu people of Sierra Valley. It is one of many I made recently for Weldon Exhibits.