Fever Tree - Maps

Following on from my early sketchbook work looking into cinchona bark and making maps, I tried putting this into action with the same process that I had done for my other gouache and dip pen imagery.

I used a light box to sketch out the lines of these maps before using my dip pen. I thought this was necessary as this needed to be accurate for the country to be at all recognisable, its not as if they are countries with an easily distinguishable shape. Although I wanted them to be accurate, I tried not to be too controlled with my line work, I wanted them to look hand crafted and not as if they had been done on a computer. Also, the results you get with dip pens look better when you loosen up a bit. I also used the light box to map out the areas within the map so I could make some ink textures that could be layered underneath the line drawings. I tried to create bark like textures but also tried to make it in-keeping with the broad gouache strokes I had been using previously. The results were textural but didn't resemble bark at all in my opinion.

I selected the best line drawing for each country which seemed to be the one with the greatest variation of line weight and then Photoshopped this onto both ink washes to chose the best one. I briefly played around with colour on Photoshop but realised that brown wouldn't fit with all my designs and might tone down the brightness of my colours too much. I am losing the concept of this being based on cinchona bark anyway so there is no real reason for this to be brown anymore. I decided to keep these maps greyscale for a number of reasons...

- Grey scale images will work with all of the colours I am currently using, there will be no clashes.

- They will allow the bright colours to stand out more.

- They will most likely be noticed secondary to the other visual elements which will make people question why there are maps on it and then search to understand why, therefore finding out about the links to Malaria No More UK.

- Having these greyscale maps on all of the bottles will link them together as a set.

Unlike the other images I have made, I cleaned up the edges of all of these maps so there was a clean cut edge all the way around the country's border. I think this makes them look more graphic and clean cut. Also because they might be at a very small scale when they are in the pattern, I don't want any confusion about what is actually the outline of this shape. I thought about adding on the name of each country to the maps in the traditional way but once these images are part of a pattern, they will be a lot smaller and the text would be unreadable.