Very Expensive Maps

By Very Expensive Maps

What's Very Expensive Maps about?

You get what you pay for: professional cartographer Evan Applegate interviews better cartographers. Listen to the best living mapmakers describe how they create worlds in pixels, ink, graphite, threads, film, paint, ceramic, wood and metal. For show notes and bonus content visit https://veryexpensivemaps.com

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Very Expensive Maps episodes:

05.13.2024
Hap Wilson: “If there’s no risk then there’s no adventure, right?”
Ontario explorer, mapmaker, and conservationist Hap Wilson on drawing 400 guide maps across 50 years, traveling more than 40,000 miles of Canadian wilderness by canoe, the one digital tool he likes (it’s Google Earth), saving lives by creating a map...
04.30.2024
Erick Ingraham: “I guess I gravitate towards difficulty.”
Colorado painter, illustrator and mapmaker Erick Ingraham on solving art directors’ problems, making it interesting for himself (“I’m known to make things more complicated than they might need to be”), spending eight years painting the Rockies’ western slope, working from...
02.20.2024
Stephen Walter: “Maps are inherently political if they’re interesting.”
London artist and mapmaker Stephen Walter on two decades of drawing and painting “the semiotic residues of humankind,” an invitation to map an Ivorian national park (and why you should wait for the dry season before attempting this), approaching six...
12.26.2023
John Tauranac: “I seldom think macroscopically; I think microscopically.”
Manhattan writer and cartographer John Tauranac on his first maps of Midtown’s pedestrian passages, a public debate with Massimo Vignelli (“His geography was egregious”), working at a very different MTA (they used to have an aesthetics committee?), the “no improvements”...
12.12.2023
Andrew Middleton: “There’s something poetic about running a map store.”
In early 2023 GIS analyst and cartographer Andrew Middleton saw a tweet about Andy Nosal’s search for someone to take over The Map Center, Nosal's map shop in Pawtucket, RI; six months later Middleton left California to move into one...
12.04.2023
Lionel Portier: “What I'm trying to convey with my maps is the pleasure of seeing beautiful things.”
Lyonnais illustrator and designer Lionel Portier on a mapmaking career that spans 30 years and five continents, accepting any map challenge an art director might conceive, a travel magazine gig that led to an Australian passport, painting 100 birds for...
11.27.2023
Isaac Dushku: “A map has to evoke a feeling of adventure or a feeling of home.”
Utah artist Isaac Dushku on how a map has to evoke either a feeling of adventure or a feeling of home, the best- and worst-selling states in his catalog (he drew all 50), taking his business Lord of Maps from...
11.20.2023
Sam Usle: “Slowly but surely we’re starting to recover the built environment.”
Urbanist and illustrator Sam Usle on designing human-scale communities and rendering them in watercolors, why theme parks reflect a yearning for human-scale towns, redesigning part of his high school campus before graduation, why you can thank Le Corbusier for hideous...
11.13.2023
Naomi Rosenberg: "Get out of your sighted bubble.”
Naomi Rosenberg, assistant director of the Media and Accessible Design Lab at San Francisco’s LightHouse for the Blind, discusses the art of making fingertip-readable maps: why clutter is the enemy of good tactile maps, the quest for an affordable embosser,...
10.09.2023
Matthew Dean Shaffer: “My approach is to try and be as accurate as possible.“
New Haven architectural designer and artist Matthew Dean Shaffer on balancing accuracy with art, taking a break from straight lines to draw birds, software-driven homogeneity in American architecture (“Straight-out-of-Revit, as we say”), why he draws the vegetation last, how anything’s...
10.02.2023
Jamshid Kooros: “These maps are based on walking, walking, walking.”
Arlington “reformed architect” and pictorial cartographer Jamshid Kooros discusses his 30 years of mapmaking based on photographs, sketching and “walking, walking, walking,” the end of the drop-in pitch, turning three-week hikes into maps of French cities and castles, doing his...
09.25.2023
David Kulbeth: “It's taken so long to get everything just right because there's no guidebook to this.”
Stafford cartographer and entrepreneur David Kulbeth on reviving old map aesthetics with his digital-to-copperplate-to-print-to-watercolor technique, the (costly) difference between copperplate etching and engraving, finding a custom papermaker, keeping his art affordable, finding style inspiration in 12 moving boxes of cartography...
09.18.2023
Sophie Parr: “I have to mathematically scale it, plan it, sketch it, draw it.”
Fish Creek artist and gallery owner Sophie Parr on creating more than one hundred 0.5"-to-the-mile maps using aerial imagery and a 0.2mm-tip pen, why she only accepts 2x2" commissions (while working on her own 2x3 ft. map of Chicago), representing...
09.11.2023
Lee France: “It was fun to try to achieve those paper map elements in this new digital space.”
Sandpoint cartographer Lee France on making his first topos in Chile, spending months on a single map for National Geographic Trails Illustrated, the challenge of making an attractive interactive map that includes every scale from hilltop to hemisphere, how an...
09.04.2023
Gregor Turk: “I always focused on the map’s ability to simultaneously represent and distort reality.”
Atlanta visual artist, sculptor and “topophiliac” Gregor Turk on walking 250 miles of the U.S./Canada border, creating landscapes with clay, wood and recycled inner tubes, turning Landsat imagery into hundreds of hand-painted ceramic tiles, making 1:1 scale maps, chasing phantom streets, fighting...
08.21.2023
Tom Patterson: “Right now is the golden age of cartography.”
Leesburg cartographer Tom Patterson on his decades creating visitor maps for the National Park Service (there’s a good chance his work is crumpled in your glovebox), learning to draw terrain by corresponding with an artist in Scotland, why he doesn’t...
08.15.2023
Melinda Clarke & Deborah Young Monk: “The beauty of the whole project is that we had no idea what we were doing.”
St Leonards map producer/founder Melinda Clarke and Melbourne illustrator Deborah Young Monk discuss their collaborations across more than three decades, how to tell an artist they need to redraw three months of work, scouting territory by car, helicopter and hot...
08.08.2023
Neil Gower: “Twice a week I’ll make a mark on paper and think ‘I wouldn’t want to be doing anything other than what I’m doing.”
Lewes/Berlin graphic artist and “exuberant mapmaker” Neil Gower on painting an estate plan when the grounds are unfinished, the work that gives him a “hum in the pelvis,” what Frank Zappa has in common with high-effort fake maps, an abandoned...
08.02.2023
Andrew Lynch: “I wish somebody else had done this, but I guess I'm gonna have to figure it out.”
New York City cartographer and QueensLink chief design officer Andrew Lynch on using library archives, train-mounted GoPro footage and his own two feet to plot every track in the New York City subway system, a brush with cubicle-based urban planning...
07.26.2023
Danielle Currie: “Zoom in buddy, it ain’t paint!”
New Brunswick embroidery artist Danielle Currie discusses her fans among NASA’s Ocean Processing Group, spending more than 400 hours to render an Icelandic river in straight stitches, her hoops being mistaken for paintings, how you really have to enjoy the...
07.18.2023
Gabriel Camus: “That would be the dream, to make this city that never ends.”
Toronto architect and artist Gabriel Camus discusses the 20" wide, 20 ft. long imagined cityscape he’s been drawing since 2018, a 100 ft. (!) illustration he's never seen the whole of for want of space to roll it out, the...
07.10.2023
Simon Polster: “I was hitchhiking from Iran to Berlin and spent quite a long time in the Caucasus.”
Königs Wusterhausen mapmaker Simon Polster discusses falling into his first topo mapping project after hitchhiking from Iran to Berlin, using Soviet topographic maps as a starting point to map Armenian hiking trails, donating data to OpenStreetMap, the eternal method of...
07.03.2023
Kevin Sheehan: “There’s something good about using old ways of doing things.”
East Yorkshire artist-cartographer Kevin Sheehan discusses picking a fight with fellow history PhDs by drawing a 19x29” calfskin portolan chart of the Mediterranean, spending 2 months stippling the lunar surface with a dip pen, acquiring a novel accent after 20...
06.27.2023
Jeff Clark: “Paper maps are dead, long live paper maps.”
Vancouver “accidental cartographer” Jeff Clark discusses his 100-layer 18-month project to map the Salish Sea bioregion, the importance of testing your waterproof trail map paper, getting a big boost from the local press, the eternal hassle of bathymetric data, consulting...
06.19.2023
Anthony Despalins: “I feel this energy when creating impossible landscapes, spaces, configurations.”
Lisbon cartographer and artist Anthony Despalins on using the visual language of French 1:50k topos to create imagined landscapes, a toolkit of pencils, poems, markers, memories and ink, drawing inspiration from the Gironde estuary and Matthew 6:9, sketching entire layouts...
06.12.2023
Grant Preller: “It started as a fun project and has turned into something I would definitely call a vocation.”
Margaret River cartographer and surfer Grant Preller on catching waves down the Iberian coast in a 1980 VW bus, spending five years on foot marking promising breaks along 50 miles of Australian coastline, relating local history with maps, the plan...
06.05.2023
Aaron Taveras: “I would stare at topos for days on end and thought it’d be fun to make them myself.”
Reno cartographer and outdoorsman Aaron Taveras on why he started making his own trail maps, “taking [his] sweet time” to create a hyper-detailed monochrome 4x5’ map of Nevada landforms, beginning a map with the raster data, an inspiring backcountry ski...
05.30.2023
Jake Coolidge: “It’s a great way to learn a place, to try to map it well.”
Redwood City cartographer and artist Jake Coolidge on making maps the hard way with ink, graphite, a metal scribe, copper, wax and ferric chloride, the difference between in silico and in vivo cartographic generalization, creating novel projections with two-point perspective,...
05.24.2023
Daniel Coe: “Science and art can make these really interesting images.”
Olympia cartographer and graphics editor Daniel Coe on his journey from Alaska sea kayak guide to geomorphology storyteller, what you learn in an office (and family) full of geologists, getting laid off and traveling the world for a year, how...
05.23.2023
Anton Thomas: “That mix of serious cartography and serious art; I love that.”
Nelson artist-cartographer Anton Thomas discusses his travels from Utah to the Himalayas, creating “that mix of serious cartography and serious art,” logging his drawing time with a stopwatch, collecting photo references for 1,500 species, how drawing the little cartouche map-within-a-map...
05.22.2023
Nat Slaughter: “I seem to be drawn to maps that have a timeless quality.”
Cupertino cartographer, designer and artist Nat Slaughter on using hardcore wildlife survey techniques to count squirrels with Jamie Allen, putting sound installations in shipping containers, the two years of shoe-leather data collection that went into his 5x2’ Central Park map,...
05.19.2023
Jane Crosen: “I thought ‘Well, I’m going to do my own labels using calligraphy, and then I can be my own typesetting machine.’”
Penobscot, Maine mapmaker Jane Crosen discusses her 40+ year cartographic career, the sound advice of “when in doubt, leave it out,” creating spoof maps for the nautical market, producing two expanded and rearranged editions of George Colby's 1881 atlases of...
05.18.2023
Jug Cerović: “The map is the reality; the infrastructure is entirely virtual.”
Madrid architect and mapmaker Jug Cerović discusses the transit cartographer’s ability to shape reality, drawing hundreds of bus lines by hand, mapping first and visiting later, installing guerrilla maps in his hometown of Belgrade, organizing a new map conference, helping...
05.16.2023
Jeff Murray: “The slogan within my work is ‘look closer.’”
Somerset pen-and-ink artist Jeff Murray discusses sketching across the world during his ski bum years, selling his first print off a folding table in New Zealand, drawing in ten-hour chunks, the joy of selling art out of a gazebo, why...
05.10.2023
Carl Churchill: “Immersing myself in thousands of high quality maps allowed me to develop a certain style.”
Union City cartographer and Wall Street Journal graphics editor Carl Churchill talks his map vocation and EDM avocation, spending two weeks on an elaborate wildflower-detection remote sensing script before an editor (correctly) tossed it, making fantasy maps with GIS tools, what drum...
05.09.2023
Elliot Park: “Why would you want to create a relief map you can’t touch?”
Columbia designer, illustrator, artisan and country songwriter Elliot Park on his ten year quest to hydraulically press a good map into good materials. Discussed: the lack of texture in today’s stuff, moving from DEM to CNC to a big beautiful...
05.07.2023
Kirsten Sparenborg: “I elaborate on the emotion of places when I make maps.”
Tacoma map artist and chorographer Kirsten Sparenborg discusses her huge body of work in ink and watercolor, her years in architectural illustration, an ill-starred mural commission, making her own pigments out of local rocks, and her next 10-panel 46 sq....
05.05.2023
Aurélien Boyer-Moraes: “The most important part is that the map goes to the public, it’s useful, and it’s used.”
Lisbon transit cartographer and designer Aurélien Boyer-Moraes talks learning to use a computer at 19, creating his first 3x4 ft. transit map of an imagined Brazilian city after reading Jacques Bertin’s Semiology of Graphics cover-to-cover, preempting Google Street View in Lyon with his 6x6...
05.02.2023
Bill Marsh: “There’s something really useful about seeing the whole thing in one sweep, in great detail, all at once.”
Philadelphia cartographer and New York Times graphics editor Bill Marsh describes his 30-year project to map his adopted city, his collection of hyper-dense axonometric maps, getting the Philadelphia Inquirer to chopper a photographer over the city for him, and the...
05.01.2023
Travis Folk: “Surely there are folks desirous of traditional cartography of a modern landscape.”
Green Pond wildlife biologist and map designer for New World Cartography discusses working with artist Tony Waters, radio-tracking northern bobwhites (quail) under the pines of the Conecuh National Forest, memorializing Aldo the Llewellin Setter on a map of game birds,...
04.30.2023
Alex McPhee: “I love watching over people’s shoulders as they interact with what I do.”
Val Marie independent cartographer Alex McPhee describes learning to create enormous reference maps, his pre-mapping road trips, rural Saskatchewanians’ surprise in finding every train station on his provincial map (they didn’t believe him), how cartographers need to observe people interacting...
04.28.2023
Kate Tarling: “When you’re stitching, you’re stitching footsteps into that landscape.”
Bristol textile artist and mapmaker Kate Tarling talks freehand machine embroidering coastlines onto lampshades, her preference for silk paints (despite the hassle), color inspiration from her garden, and how she does most of her sketching in her head during dog...
04.27.2023
Sara Drake: “My brain thinks in 3D rather than 2D.”
Fremantle-based mapmaker, artist and illustrator Sara Drake on her first globe, her two-year wait list, the challenge of photographing her ultra-detailed 3D maps, and adding to a piece until “someone physically wrestles it out of [her] hands.” See her maps...
04.26.2023
Mike Hall: “I keep returning to that mid-twentieth-century style.”
British illustrator and cartographer Mike Hall talks early mapping projects of his native Harlow, his favorite map aesthetic, the relaxing practice of coastline-tracing and how he will place 1,500 labels but will not make a “Where's Wally?” map. See his...
04.25.2023
Anna Eshelman: “Where water carves; that’s fascinating to me.”
Oregon cartographic designer, illustrator and production artist Anna Eshelman talks sketching Mt. Rainier while pulling 26-mile days on the Wonderland Trail, why she starts her illustrations with a blunt pencil, and the enormous manual shaded relief she’d finish if she...
04.23.2023
Alex Hotchin: “making a career out of drawing how beautiful the world can be”
Australian cartographer and illustrator Alex Hotchin talks about her first map, cycling from Scotland to Cambodia sans GPS, and “a career drawing how beautiful the world can be.” See her work at alexhotchin.com Alex's first creative map: bottom of the page, “Jericho” ...

What's Very Expensive Maps about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Very Expensive Maps episodes:

Hap Wilson: “If there’s no risk then there’s no adventure, right?”

Erick Ingraham: “I guess I gravitate towards difficulty.”

Stephen Walter: “Maps are inherently political if they’re interesting.”

John Tauranac: “I seldom think macroscopically; I think microscopically.”

Andrew Middleton: “There’s something poetic about running a map store.”

Lionel Portier: “What I'm trying to convey with my maps is the pleasure of seeing beautiful things.”

Isaac Dushku: “A map has to evoke a feeling of adventure or a feeling of home.”

Sam Usle: “Slowly but surely we’re starting to recover the built environment.”

Naomi Rosenberg: "Get out of your sighted bubble.”

Matthew Dean Shaffer: “My approach is to try and be as accurate as possible.“

Jamshid Kooros: “These maps are based on walking, walking, walking.”

David Kulbeth: “It's taken so long to get everything just right because there's no guidebook to this.”

Sophie Parr: “I have to mathematically scale it, plan it, sketch it, draw it.”

Lee France: “It was fun to try to achieve those paper map elements in this new digital space.”

Gregor Turk: “I always focused on the map’s ability to simultaneously represent and distort reality.”

Tom Patterson: “Right now is the golden age of cartography.”

Melinda Clarke & Deborah Young Monk: “The beauty of the whole project is that we had no idea what we were doing.”

Neil Gower: “Twice a week I’ll make a mark on paper and think ‘I wouldn’t want to be doing anything other than what I’m doing.”

Andrew Lynch: “I wish somebody else had done this, but I guess I'm gonna have to figure it out.”

Danielle Currie: “Zoom in buddy, it ain’t paint!”

Gabriel Camus: “That would be the dream, to make this city that never ends.”

Simon Polster: “I was hitchhiking from Iran to Berlin and spent quite a long time in the Caucasus.”

Kevin Sheehan: “There’s something good about using old ways of doing things.”

Jeff Clark: “Paper maps are dead, long live paper maps.”

Anthony Despalins: “I feel this energy when creating impossible landscapes, spaces, configurations.”

Grant Preller: “It started as a fun project and has turned into something I would definitely call a vocation.”

Aaron Taveras: “I would stare at topos for days on end and thought it’d be fun to make them myself.”

Jake Coolidge: “It’s a great way to learn a place, to try to map it well.”

Daniel Coe: “Science and art can make these really interesting images.”

Anton Thomas: “That mix of serious cartography and serious art; I love that.”

Nat Slaughter: “I seem to be drawn to maps that have a timeless quality.”

Jane Crosen: “I thought ‘Well, I’m going to do my own labels using calligraphy, and then I can be my own typesetting machine.’”

Jug Cerović: “The map is the reality; the infrastructure is entirely virtual.”

Jeff Murray: “The slogan within my work is ‘look closer.’”

Carl Churchill: “Immersing myself in thousands of high quality maps allowed me to develop a certain style.”

Elliot Park: “Why would you want to create a relief map you can’t touch?”

Kirsten Sparenborg: “I elaborate on the emotion of places when I make maps.”

Aurélien Boyer-Moraes: “The most important part is that the map goes to the public, it’s useful, and it’s used.”

Bill Marsh: “There’s something really useful about seeing the whole thing in one sweep, in great detail, all at once.”

Travis Folk: “Surely there are folks desirous of traditional cartography of a modern landscape.”

Alex McPhee: “I love watching over people’s shoulders as they interact with what I do.”

Kate Tarling: “When you’re stitching, you’re stitching footsteps into that landscape.”

Sara Drake: “My brain thinks in 3D rather than 2D.”

Mike Hall: “I keep returning to that mid-twentieth-century style.”

Anna Eshelman: “Where water carves; that’s fascinating to me.”

Alex Hotchin: “making a career out of drawing how beautiful the world can be”

Other shows like Very Expensive Maps: