New Member, New to Modern Software
Heyla, folks...
I stumbled across this Forum while looking for a way to potentially wrap maps around globes. (Some very interesting threads from around 2008-2009 on this!)
I can't claim to be a cartographer, though I love maps. I refer to my husband as "the overly tall Hobbit," since he also loves maps.
I've done maps with pencil and paper, later inking over the roughs.
Back about 1992, I did a series of some 30 maps of Anne McCaffrey's Pern, as my husband and I did the Threadfall Charts for that lady's world. Those were done with Windows Paint, the OLD Windows Paint, like, the one that came with Windows 3.1. On a 386 machine with 4 MB (yes, that's MB, not GB!) of memory, and a 40 MB hard drive. The maps were around 2250 x 3000 pixels, black & white, and I had to work at the pixel level, making a few changes here and there, then wait for the machine to catch up to me. (Been using home computers since 1982 -- my first was an Osborne 1, with TWO 89K SSSD 5.25 floppy drives and 64K of RAM, along with a built in monochrome 52 charaacter wide screen. Stunning height of technology there -- running CP/M!)
Later, I had an improved version of Paint, called PhotoFinish, which served me well for most of what I was doing until this spring, when I went to a machine with Win 7 Pro,and my poor 16 bit PhotoFinish would no longer work. I miss it, becuse I haven't found anything, not the new Paint, not Irfanview, nor PhotoShop Elements 12, which can do some of the things PhotoFinish could. PhotoFinish didn't have layers, but I could do some nice stuff with it. (Right now, I don't have access to any of it because the NEW machine blue-screened itself to death, and I am waiting on my tech to have time to work on it. I'm on my husband's laptop.)
I was tinkering with positioning different locations on a Google Map and trying to see if there was any sort of pattern I could use for an Image I had, and my design engineer husband pointed out that I couldn't really see a pattern unless it was on a globe. True. And me not knowing how to do such a thing, started searching.
And stumbled in here.
Welcome to the guild.
One thing you might consider is getting a physical globe to plot things on, like a foam craft ball (the closed cell kind with a smooth surface)
Doing things properly on a globe is hard. It's where a great deal of the difficulty in real geography, cartography, and GIS comes from.
Yes, I've been looking for a foam globe, but haven't found one. (It's hard to put pushpins in a balloon type globe! They tend to collapse. Though I could probably use Avery coding dots.) I did take a foam sphere and covered in in clay, but the clay developed the most stunning set of cracks. Looked like the last days of Krypton!Originally Posted by Hai-Etlik
The problem with a physical globe is that I can't share it with other people who don't live near me.
Your local thrift store is likely to have Earth globes available for sale fairly cheaply. A couple coats of white primer and you have a lovely surface to draw on (true, there is that annoying terrain, but there are lots of ways to get rid of it, including sanding and paper mache).
Now that IS an idea. I may have to send my favorite scavenger out and about. I don't do a lot of physical shopping due to disabilities. Being unemployed at the moment,Iam all in favor of CHEAP. Thanks for the suggestion.
I got one at the local thrift store a few years back for $10, including a stand. One of the folks at work also brought me one that they were going to throw out because it was out of date. I spray-painted that one with some high-gloss metallic gold that I had left over from another project and hung it from the ceiling. It's one of the el-cheapo Replogle globes with the terrain molded in; the terrain is all that's visible and then only as variations in relief: the effect in the sunlight is very pretty.
It sounds like it would be, yes!
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
