Appreciate it, and I’d almost rather tell you about my workflow on my latest project, because it was 400 hours of work…the art was totally physical art…(176 fruits)...but the workflow was very digital, and there were so many parts to it that it is almost laughable…My maps are really easy to create; they became a little more sophisticated when a Travel Channel pilot asked me to make maps for their show, and, thinking the show would last longer than the pilot, I invested all this time in working on different maps. Basically, I need rights to the source outline, and that’s usually pretty easy. Sometimes I have bought a stock art outline to make sure I had rights. There are 3 ways to get that on watercolor paper or bristol. I can trace it on a light table, I can copy it by hand, or I can do the outline in Fresco and print to watercolor paper (I have only been able to do this for the past 6 months and is the dream workflow for this). Then I usually try different things, but its basically about building blue outlines with a fine watercolor brush or a Copic pen for the water and earthtones or greens for the landmass. Then using bigger brushes to slowly build the interior colors. My goal is often to do something a bit weird or challenging the way people think of the colors of a certain place. In the case of the two Hawaii maps, I was traveling but had cancelled plans, so I had two days alone with my Tablet, and I just kept trying different things. It ended up being about 3 key layers: making those depth layers very transparent and light. At home, I had started creating physical watercolor and Copic to the islands, and integrated that as a very light transparent layer; I can never get Fresco watercolor to feel right (although there are also 4 layers of Fresco watercolor spatter on the islands.) My scanner is only 9x12, so the biggest challenge of any of these projects that involves larger physical artwork is stitching the parts together in Photoshop. I always thought that maps enhance travel or science writing…National Geo and Outside as examples…and so I try to create maps when it can help my story. For all this detail I gave you though, full handpainted maps (like Malta and Tunisia) were probably just an hour or two to completion.

That makes sense. The wording made it sound like it was hand drawn on a medium like paper, not a computer. To me, hand drawn implies using physical paper and marking tools. This is digital illustration which implies hand drawn input to a computer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_illustration

The font on the map, not the web page text.

while Ni'ihau is privately owned, wikipedia says it is occupied by native Hawaiians who speak only Hawaiian, the only island unsullied by English.

It is so massive he has to make affordances Epstein never had to. You can visit Lanai today for example. I took a day trip there a couple years ago. Saw the cat sanctuary. Not much else to do there. There is a little holdover company town inland from the Dole days but I didn't visit that. I'm not sure how much time Ellison even spends there. I get the sense that having these some 3k common folk holdout residents plus visitors makes it a bit less attractive than it might have seemed when he signed his name on 98% of a Hawaiian island. Seems a couple years ago he shifted his primary residency to his mansion near Mar a Lago. Bored of the plaything now, I guess.