Did you ever use old teabags to stain paper
for a treasure map? When my daughter was still at school, we had heaps of often
quite hysterical fun aging stuff for projects. We did all sorts of daft things:
softened up old cheese coverings to mould false wax seals, ‘weathered’
parchment by setting fire to the edges (several times, as the first attempts
usually had to be dumped in the washing up bowl for fear of triggering the
smoke alarm), poured salt, broken pasta and even lentils, so help me, onto puddles
of PVA glue …
Now Lauren’s off at uni doing History of
Art at Edinburgh, I found I was pining for such lovely messy arts and crafts, until I decided
to use my rather Jurassic graphics package to create a detailed, antique-style map
to accompany a fantasy adventure book called Ice Trekker.
It turned out to be infinitely more fiddly
than doing it by hand, but with the help of Creative Commons, crazy free fonts
with odd names and some sneaky text editing tricks I used when I was a
sub-editor, I got there in the end.
In fact, it was a useful exercise, as it
made me literally map out the adventure and ensure everyone was where they
ought to be. I might even try again for another book.
The results are now on the blog, and I
fully intend to include the map on my next submission. Here’s the final result.
Comments
Post a Comment