- [Jessica] The granularity of detail is
definitely helping me understand how this took five years.
Hey, I'm Jessica Hester, staff writer at Atlas Obscura
and this is "Show & Tell,"
a series where we chat with fascinating people
about the fascinating things that they do.
Many of us are stuck at home right now,
and today I'm going to be chatting with someone
who has been gracious enough to let us into his home.
You might know him
from a story by my colleague Isaac Schultz,
about a giant map.
I'm thrilled to be speaking with Anton Thomas.
Hey, Anton.
- Hey Jessica
My craft is to make hand-drawn maps
with colored pencil and fineliner pen.
And yeah, I started drawing this map of North America just
because I wanted to,
not with any particular commercial vision.
And over the years,
it became apparent
that people might really appreciate a map like this with
tens of thousands of hand-drawn details all across it.
This is the original piece
and you can see it's a little bit muted,
the colors and everything like that,
but that's the original
was a working document and so it was more
about what I could do after getting it scanned.
- So did you draw it like,
standing up against the wall like that?
- [Anton] Yeah, yeah all vertical.
All vertical.
And the critical part of it is,
I did it under magnification, for the most part,
- [Jessica] Ooh cool.
- [Anton] so I could fit so much detail.
- Yeah.
How long would you stand there at a time?
- [Anton] I mean,
so I actually specifically timed my hours.
I would put a stopwatch every time I started working,
and I recorded almost four thousand hours,
official hours. - [Jessica] Oh, wow.
How do you erase them and fix them?
Is that a thing you can do?
Like, what if you wanna change something
when you're part way through?
- When I'm using color pencil and gray lead,
I can erase it all I want.
I use an electric eraser
and because you can't erase pen,
I tried the alternative,
which is to use this.
When you scratch off a city, like I was having to do
it damages the paper
and you have to flatten that paper out in order
to draw on it again.
This is how you flatten it out,
with the electric eraser.
So you scratch and you *chhhh* over it.
So I'm going to pull up on the screen,
the actual file.
So this is North America.
Portrait of a continent.
Where are you from, Jessica?
- [Jessica] I am from rural Canada by Chatham.
- [Anton] Okay, so I think we are starting to get
into your neighborhood a little bit, here.
- [Jessica] Yep. Yep.
It's between Windsor and London,
kind of where that boat is.
- [Anton] Oh, right!
- [Jessica] Oh my gosh! The butterfly.
It's one of the biggest places
where the monarchs stop during their migration.
We have a butterfly festival every year.
- Yes, one of the great stories of North America
is the Monarch Butterfly
and I had it up here because that's one
of the northern extents obviously.
But, if you just go all the way down here,
you see it in Mexico as well.
- [Jessica] Yes, yeah.
It's so cool though to look at it
and feel a sense of,
like, kindredness.
Like, immediately when you zoomed in,
I was like, yes, that is recognizably my home.
You just happen to choose,
to represent that area,
something that is like,
so crucially fundamental to the way
that the community identifies itself
and thinks about itself.
I think that's really cool.
- [Anton] That is amazing to hear.
I'm glad you feel that way because
that is the idea that kind of drives me
and the decisions I make about what to include.
This is Niagara Falls, obviously.
Because it flows north,
I had to draw the crest of the falls dropping away,
So it was really tricky to get a dramatic waterfall effect.
- [Jessica] Wow.
- [Anton] Yeah, I mean, and we're just in the Midwest now,
of course, this map spans all the way into the Arctic.
This is one of the reasons why I'm going
to donate a whole lot of maps to schools in
these remote communities that I've drawn,
because I don't think I've ever seen a map
of the Canadian Arctic like this.
- [Jessica] Yeah, I mean that there's just so much detail.
What did you use to research
the kind of granular topography of it?
- Well, it's a similar process to anywhere else.
You just read all you can about a region
and figure out what keeps showing up.
In terms of the topography that's a little bit easier.
You just look at some topographic maps of the area
and then figure out where the mountains are.
So all my capital cities,
whether they're of countries or they're of
states or provinces and territories,
they are marked off with the flag
of the entity flying above their parliament buildings
or their legislature.
We were in Haiti before.
Actually, this is just the example
I'll show you quickly, about Haiti.
Port-au-Prince.
There's this push towards doing something
that's more idealistic
and I don't wanna just be drawing
postcards here showing all the best sides of the place.
I want to tell the real story of the place to some degree.
The cathedral and the governmental palace
both fell in the earthquake.
And so I drew them
sort of ghostly,
again sort of as placeholders as one day,
there'll be new landmarks, but--
- [Jessica] I think that's really interesting that use of
different style to convey
that something's no longer standing.
Are there other ways in the map that you,
you represent things less literally
or with an eye towards
helping people understand the history of a place?
- [Anton] I would certainly say so.
History is a big part of a place
and some places are almost defined by their history.
Look at Roswell, New Mexico,
this whole alien thing has popped up over there.
- [Jessica] Totally.
- [Anton] That's a sort of really strange little piece
of history from half a century ago.
Cryptids and urban legends have such a distinct
and special role in the identity of a place.
Here's Sasquatch,
actually not far from Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox.
- [Jessica] (chuckles)
- [Anton] By northern California and Willow Creek
where the famous Patterson-Gimlin footage was shot.
- [Jessica] Is that a dinosaur?
- [Anton] Yes. (chuckles)
It's the reason I wanna go up here
when I talk about history...
Let's go really far back.
That's the world's largest T-Rex statue.
- This map is inspiring a lot of wanderlust for me.
I've never been to Calgary or actually anywhere in Alberta.
- Well, it's one of the purposes of the map, too.
I like to show people that the world is fascinating
and you should be excited even with what's in your backyard.
Because it's just that it's a gift to be here.
- [Jessica] So is your hope
that people will look at the symbols and then
go and do some research on their own
and figure out the stories behind them?
Like it's so cool that you know all of this information.
- [Anton] Absolutely.
I love the idea that people would take this
and research and try to figure out what's going on.
With the knowledge that basically
every piece of illustration has a reason behind it,
I'm not making stuff up.
That white bison, for example, it has a name.
His name is Big Medicine.
- [Jessica] The granularity of detail
is definitely helping me understand
how this took five years.
- [Anton] I'm glad you can see that.
Yeah, it's hard to tell. (Jessica chuckles)
I mean, every single line here in Portland,
every single line had to be ruled.
This is a ruler from a stationary store
and it's a spirit level,
that I just super glued to it.
Because I draw vertically,
it means that the level works.
I can actually get level lines.
So every single skyscraper,
every single straight line,
every city label, which are all flush
with each other across the map,
I get it just leveled up.
I mean, extrapolate that over 600 different skylines.
My baseline is to have
any city with more
than 100,000 people in the metropolitan area.
But I do round up the cities into a central hub.
That's why you're not seeing Seattle, Everett, or Tacoma
because skylines take up so much space that
I have to just choose the hub city,
the really big one
and then kind of round it up.
This has caused a lot of controversy.
I mean, a lot.
- [Jessica] I'm sure, yeah.
- [Anton] Yeah. Well, one of the biggest,
if we go down here to California,
you know, San Francisco is one of the most
famous cities in the world.
It has infinite amounts of content that you can draw from
and to try to fit Oakland just east of it on East Bay
is like, well, it's super tough.
Would I do it differently at times?
Yeah.
I'll just draw a map of California one day,
really detailed.
- [Jessica] Oh, I would love that.
People looking at this,
who spend a lot of time poking around our site
will definitely recognize things.
Like, the Salton Sea is a really popular thing on the Atlas
because it does have that crazy story
about like environmental disaster
and engineering gone awry.
I'm trying to think if there are any other places
in the Atlas that might be represented.
- [Anton] I would expect there would probably be dozens.
Here's Burning Man over in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada,
(Jessica chuckles)
and Burning Man's really the biggest thing happening
in Black Rock Desert.
And so here's a giant thing...
The map is more than just the United States and Canada,
of course, the other big factor is Mexico,
which I adored drawing.
And it goes beyond that as well.
All the way into Central America and the Caribbean.
One of the cool things with this project
is all four corners.
They fade out into space.
Let's see down here, there's actual constellations.
I put a lot of work in to get ocean topography accurate,
and a lot of the creatures that you see,
they're all specific to the place,
just like the land is.
These are my favorite to draw.
Some of these just really monster-looking ones.
- [Jessica] Yeah, they're so cool.
They're like the cryptids of the ocean,
but they're real. (chuckles)
- [Anton] Well, actually, that's an interesting point
you bring up there.
So, animals are cryptids in their own way.
They have that same role.
I mean, if you had never seen a grizzly bear before
and you ran into a grizzly,
and, well, lived to tell the tale,
what's the difference between that
and like a medieval monster,
in a lot of ways?
The real world is better than any fantasy world
that's ever been conjured.
This is the cartouche.
So a cartouche is quite a long tradition with map-making.
It's, usually a very decorative emblem,
where the title of the map is,
often the publication details.
The key or legend will sometimes be there
and it's more or less like the condensed version
of the entire project.
- [Jessica] Totally.
Anton, thank you so much for hanging out with us
and letting us explore your studio,
and also the amazing map
that you spent five years
painstakingly filling with all of these details.
There's so much to wander around
and if people want to find more of your work,
how do they do that from home?
- Sure, well, thank you so much for having me.
It's been an absolute pleasure
to go exploring the map with you.
I can't remember all the details myself,
so it's been a nice reminder
and you can get me on Instagram @Anton.Thomas
and my website where prints are available as well,
www.antonthomasart.com
So yeah, that's where you can find me.
- Awesome. Thank you for hanging out with us.
Take care.
- Thank you. Bye bye.
- Thanks for watching "Show & Tell".
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