nazSTUFF - Vector Based Colorado River Map

Rascal Inquires, " If You Are Not Concerned About the Future, Then You Haven't Been Paying Attention." This, then is our advertising campaign, to contribute to your well being.

Grand Canyon River Trip Map

The goal in creating this poster is to create a graphic presentation that serves as a guide or souvenir to anyone who is going on or has gone on a Colorado River Trip through the Grand Canyon.

Vector Based Topo Map - Grand Canyon

This project begins in Adobe® Illustrator 8.0. I have scanned several portions of forest service topo maps and re-composed them into a panorama that covers the area between Lake Powell and Lake Mead. I've re-sized the Photoshop® image to fit a tabloid layout that I can use as a guide in Illustrator. This ensures that my finished map will be accurate in detail and to scale. Also, building it in Illustrator creates a "vector" file that can be re-sized and printed at high resolution at any size. The image above shows a small portion of the "outlines" I've created in Illustrator, traced over actual topography of the river, side canyons, buttes and other features.

The process of building this map and the resulting poster took nearly three months. This simple tutorial also shows how I used the image in a final publication.

The key to understanding what makes this illustration work is how I applied the same blend over and over to the individual outline shapes. You can see in the illustration above that I accurately traced the topo contours from the base map, insuring cliff and canyon edge lines were correct. I applied variations of the same master blend to these overlapping shapes, ALWAYS toward the river. The blend tool allowed me to vary the value so that deeper and smaller canyons and creeks are visible within the bigger canyons below the various mesas. The images below show the result

These two images are "screen shots" of my map work in progress. The one above shows the Havasupai area and how it attaches to the main basin of the Grand Canyon. The image below is a close up of the main portion of the canyon most often visited by the public. The north rim plateau is clearly visible. Both the north and south rim contours are accurate inviting unlimited uses when building interpretive maps. You'll also notice that I've indicated every major rapid in its correct location in the Colorado River.

The Final Poster

The process of building the master graphic for the poster includes many traditional Photoshop techniques. The first step was to build a background woodgrain pattern that was actual size and at the resolution I needed for the original. This is standard Photoshop fare, creating a rectangle filled with a color germain to the map colors, adding "noise" pixels and blurring them horizontally. Then I OPEN the Illustrator map file from Photoshop and "raster" it to size at a resolution that matches my background file. When this is done I DRAG/COPY it onto my background, do a little color correction to make the map "fit" the background color, then I add an outside BEVEL to the map image that makes it look as if it has been engraved into the woodgrain background. This adds a nice dimension to the presentation. I then added a series of Grand Canyon photos (first version) in different layers between the background and the river map. To these I add white outlines and drop shadows. I also add some spot art, like the split twig figure, a famous archaeological find at the Grand Canyon.

Here you see how I "nested" the photograph of the Nankoweap Graneries into the river map contour, making a nice composition. Then I developed the map title graphic lettering. This gives me a finished master file for my poster. I SAVE a version as an EPS file and PLACE it into a new blank page in Adobe InDesign so I could type in the legend.