Jul 26

Welcome to the Trails! (Water’s Edge, Meadow, and Trail Map)

After a week’s worth of work and a late night pulling everything together, I completed not only the Water’s Edge Panel, but an additional trail map put together based on Google Earth and my own illustrations.

Water’s Edge Panel:

Much like the Forest Edge Panel, the Water’s Edge Panel is an introduction to both the trail and the habitat that it is in. It contains several original artworks of birds that can be seen on the trail and additional fun facts.

My rough draft mainly focused on general placement. Although the final draft changed drastically, the original idea, a cross section of the lake, remained.
It took me a week to complete all of the birds, but one night, I was filled with determination to create the entirety of the background, which was a huge success and completed the panel.

Meadow Panel:

Again, the Meadow Panel is a simple introduction to its trail. In this panel, I wanted to specifically focus on the Bluebird Nestboxes and its native cavity-nesting birds.

I had only a rough idea of what birds and backgrounds will be on this panel. Due to the inherent open-ness of the meadow, I decided to have its focus be on nest-boxes rather than environment.
This panel is currently a bit messy, so it isn’t the final draft. The Texas Bluebird Society, which helped to review the Eastern Bluebird panel, may take a look to ensure that the information is correct. Once that is done, I will start cleaning it up.
It is always exciting to compare the improvements between my artwork and its final Illustrator product. The barn swallow and the American Kestrel were my favorite!

Trail Map:

My original map, which I used to detail my vision for the trails at Pure Hope Ranch, was basically a few sketched lines overlaid onto the map used for disc golfing, which, due to it being rather outdated, was already a bit inaccurate with the placements of map’s landmarks. Plainly, it was pressing that a more pretty and precise portrayal be produced for the purposes of my project. (sorry, I had to!)

I actually started working on this map during the long car ride back from Texas earlier this summer, but it was only just now finished. Taking a look, I hope that you can see why it took so long!

Using my memory of the trail locations, aerial views from Google Earth, and the original map that I created, I worked hard to create this new, higher quality, and more exact map of the trails, all while keeping with the same cartoonish image quality as my panels.

This map ended up being so good that we decided not to just stop with a simple laminated copy hung up in the Welcome Center Pergola (which, by the way, is a very exciting story – but that is a topic for another blog). Instead, we went all the way: this map was turning into another graphic panel!

However, this panel was going to be different – and bigger – than any of the others. Every good Welcome Center Pergola needs a place to sit down, and what would be a better for that than a table? That’s right, This map is going to become 2′ x 6′ graphic table!

Because people can sit on either side of the table, there is going to be two maps so that it can be viewed from either direction.

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