A Little Vanity Project

Daftrica, the grand-daddy of my full color maps

        I have been fascinated by maps since my childhood. The concentration of information that a good map represents is a wonderful thing. My wargaming with maps started when my brother and I got a copy of Avalon Hill's "Luftwaffe" for Christmas, we played that so many time the counters fell apart. A short while later we discovered "Panzerblitz" this had geo-morphic maps that contained much more information. It opened our eyes to lanes of fire, reverse slope positions, and using terrain to mask our maneuvers.

       As I graduated to miniature wargaming we soon found the urge to run campaigns that strung together our battles to give them a larger context. My love of maps caused me to volunteer to make the map for out Napoleonic campaign set in Andalusia. It was a crude affair drawn on white hex-paper using color markers but it did the job. The next campaign was a Thirty Years War era set in a mythical land, this map was again drawn on hex-paper but was much more detailed and drawn in colored pencil with much greater emphasis on making it look like a period map. This kept us busy for a few years until the sheer work of the old-fashioned rules wore us out. 

       Our next great adventure was Victorian Science Fiction Colonialism. Faced with having to run a campaign of exploration I decided to create and entirely new continent instead of having the player pretend that they didn't know where the Nile began. Thus was born Daftrica (it looks suspiciously like Africa but it's different) the map of which was painted onto a large sheet of foamcore in full color. I greatly enjoyed the process and the guys were so enamored of the campaign they they had the map framed (see above). Since then I have created two other imaginations-style continents; Neulandia and Epicurea (see below). 

 

Neulandia

 

 

Epicurea

       Somewhere along the way it occurred to me that it would be amusing to incorporate all of the imaginary places onto a globe, not that it would create a playable map or serve any useful purpose, just to create an interesting bauble. Stumbling across a styrofoam sphere at a local craft store suddenly made this an imperative and off I went. The first step was to cover the surface with glue and tissue to hide the beading of the styrofoam and the give an "old-fashioned" covered with parchment look. A coat of flat white paint and I pencilled-in the continents adding a few more to fill in the empty places. In the end I had a planet the looked sort-of like Earth but was different in all of the details. I haven't come up with a name yet but here it is!

 

North Polar

 

North Western Hemisphere

 

South Western Hemisphere

 

 

South Polar

 

North Atalantica

 

Mid Atalantica 

 

South Atlantica

 

Nordland and Northern Epicurea

 

Epicurea and the Great Middle Sea

 

Daftrica

 

Northern Eastern Hemisphere 

Siberkska

 

Central Eastern Hemisphere

The Pillars of Heaven

 

 

Southern Eastern Hemisphere

The Ocean of the Indies 

Indica

Neulandia

 

Northwest Pacifica

Kamchatska

Choson

 

Western Pacifica

 Choson 

Nippon

 

Southwest Pacifica

Nippon (hiding in the glare)

Balimatra

Neulandia 

Alstramia (on the right)

 

Northeast Pacifica

Danlaskia

 

 

Central Eastern Pacifica

 

Southeastern Pacifica

Seeland Islands 

Balcorus Peninsula

       Now I just need to locate some decals so I can label things and then I can give it a shot of matte-finish and mount it for display.