Oh man, i don’t even know where to start with this project. After illustrating the insides & outsides of dozens of local shops, ErinRose Baldry from the Maplewood Village Alliance reached out and asked if I could do a map of all of downtown Maplewood’s businesses. Obviously, I leapt at this opportunity.

I hadn’t ever done anything like this before! And I love the illustrated maps that you see of other towns, cities, etc. I fired up my hardly-used pinterest account just to get some inspiration on how other illustrators have tackled such a job. This was a huge challenge! It’s easily the largest, most complicated thing I’ve ever worked on. On top of this illustration, there will be a printed version in Matters Magazine with all of the shops numbered and labeled.

Let me tell you… that part was bananas. But I persisted! On top of that, it gave ErinRose an opportunity to do a thorough audit of all of the active businesses downtown. It had been years since a full list was built, and now it’s very solid. Go team.

I met ErinRose at Jerry Rose floral (no relation), when she was being brought around to all the local shops by Amy Howlett. I was in Jerry Rose to promote my book when i was kickstarting it. Meeting ErinRose was justa. a happy accident of schmoozing. We kept in touch, and months later she reached out with this idea of a map for Matters Magazine. To give full credit, Mika from A Paper Hat may have planted that seed years ago. She had floated this idea to me in the past, and it’s always been percolating on a back burner of mine. Now it is growing into a real life thing!

I started by doodling a little bit downtown one day just as a proof-of-concept to see if this was even feasible. It was a loose, rough sketch. I needed to know what happened when I drew these facades at 1/100 scale and tried to draw them all together at the scale of the paper I was using! After about half an hour i was convinced that it was doable. (Obviously everything is doable, but I hadn’t done anything like this before). Next, I had to bend space and time to my will to make it all work.

Then I forgot to make the train bridge. This is obviously an iconic part of maplewood, and 100% needed to be in the map. I had already drawn that little patch of landscaping underneath it though. Oh no! What was I going to do?!? Again, I can make & break rules - so I drew the bridge on another piece of paper, cut it out, and stuck it on. I actually drew that bridge three times before I had one that I liked. I sure hope someone notices the gum wall underneath the train bridge. That’s my other favorite part.

No such luck with the whole map though! No starting over with as huge a project as this! At one point I almost abandoned it because I thought I hated where it was going. I did a bunch of quick, frustrated pen drawing one late evening expecting to start over the next day, but the next day I looked at it and I loved it again and kept on keeping on.

I spent every day of the week over about two weeks perching in spots downtown, drawing for 10 minutes then moving up the street to draw some more. There’s a real strong chance you saw me out there. This was so much fun actually. As disturbingly warm as this fall has been, it sure was nice to sit outside & chat with people as they saw me working on this. I got a cupcake out of a friend passing by. I got interviewed by some guys working on a school project (I wish I could find those people & see what they came up with). I found out about this 1910 map from a Alexander Black - a complete stranger - who described it and emailed me this link afterwards. https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3814m.pm005190/?r=-0.043,0.003,1.189,0.76,0