A Map-Maker’s Guide to Create Your Own Story Map Travel Journal There are 100’s of How To Guides available on-line and at the library that will improve your travel writing, teach you how to draw, develop your skills to create beautiful scrapbook journals, and take better travel photographs.īut I’d like to share with you some tools, tips and tricks from my quirky cartographic viewpoint. How ever many words is a story-map worth? They say a picture is worth a thousand words – …some of the best stories I’ve ever read were maps.”Īs a cartographer I’m forever amazed how a single sheet map can convey so much information succinctly, comprehensibly and have such visual appeal. “Maps are our most primeval narrative instruments. You’re laying out and linking the events of your day by positioning the words, the lines and the pictorial symbols so their spacial relationship on your journal page reveals the tale. This is essentially the secret of a story map. Where you start with a central theme from which thoughts and ideas branch out across the page forming a map that links the concept together? So if you held a pencil in kindergarten and drew symbolic renditions from memory of your family and home, you already possess the skill required to create a story-map too! If you look at the symbols I used in the above story-map, the square block houses are represented by the kind of house we as children in kindergarten would draw – They’re representations that are drawn from how your mind’s eye sees or perceives them. In other words, they’re not complex realistic drawings that require time and observation – some symbols, which with their need to be easily recognizable are often a simple doodle.The size of the job required to cull through each of the 20 different angles I took of each subject as the light changed is too daunting and so they get left for ‘one day’.Īnd I’m going to share with you how to travel journal like a map-maker and…Ĭreate story-map travel journal pages like below, I take 1,000’s of photos to capture the beauty I see but must confess that most of them still languish on their SD cards – I admire craftspeople who pedantically collect, collate, arrange and stick, to create heirlooms for future generations –īut somehow that day to sit down and start sorting, mysteriously never happens. I’d love to be able to emulate sketchbook journallers who with their evocative splodges convey a spontaneity.īut my efforts, to me – fall disappointingly flat. In fact I generally find walls of solid text quite daunting and uninviting.Īnd when delving into my own unedited first drafts, I have to be honest, I find their wordy roughness hard going. I don’t know about you, but the reality is… Traveller’s Treasure Trove By photographs?īut over the years I’ve struggled how best to record them in a way that doesn’t feel like homework – either at the time OR later!
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