Activity Guide by Kate Kwasneski
Intern, Grinnell College Museum of Art
Learn and Look
People have been making maps for about as long as there have been places to go! Mapmakers have existed in basically every time and place, and today we call them cartographers. Maps are supposed to give information about a place, and often they are used to help people get from one place to another, but maps can also be considered works of art. The Grinnell College Museum of Art has several beautiful maps in its collection.
Maps can be used to show things like roads and directions, they can show elevation and sea level, or they can show the borders between countries and states. Maps can be used to give basically any information about a place that you could want, and they can look very different depending on what information is on them. Maps often have titles, telling you what part of the world they show, as you can see in the map below. The places in maps are often not drawn exactly like they look in real life, instead the things on a map are represented by symbols, like triangles for mountains and lines for roads. Similarly, the places on maps are not drawn the size they are in real life! Maps have a scale to make sure everything on them is the same size relative to each other. For example, you could draw a map where everything is 100 times bigger in real life compared to on the map, and your scale would be 1:100.
This map is very old, and shows Mexico and Florida in the 1700s, before we had GPS and satellites to help us make our maps more accurate. Do you see any areas that look different on modern maps?
This is a world map from Europe in 1493! Does it look anything like a world map from today? The people who made this map did not know about certain parts of the world, but this map is still very beautiful. Look at the wind being blown from the faces on the edges of the map. Was this map supposed to be realistic? What do you think about the figures shown on the left? The people who made this map thought that there might be monsters in the parts of the world they had not been to, and on the left they drew what they thought those monsters might look like. At this point in history, boats did not have motors and could only use sails, which might be why the wind was important enough to be drawn as humans on the edges of this map.
This might not look like a map at first, but this crossword is actually made of the names of hundreds of bodies of water. The background is a topographical map of water. That means that the lines you see actually tell us the depth of the water, and if it were a map of land the lines would give information about elevation.
This is a map of the moon, done in interesting colors to make it a work of art. What do you think about the colors used in this piece? Can you learn anything about the surface of the moon by looking at it (hint: is the moon’s surface flat)?
Create
You can make your own map! It can show a real place, or somewhere completely imaginary. Think about what you want your map to show. Should it show elevation? Where roads are? Or do you want it to just show what is land and what is water?
My map is meant to show the terrain of the place I mapped. I based it off of a part of Norway called Svalbard, but the placement of mountains and rivers were my own decisions. Think about all the details you could add. What are you trying to show about the place you are mapping? I wanted to show where there was grassland, forest, and mountain, so I used a lot of color. I used colored pencils to make my map, you could also use crayons, paint, or markers. Take your time when making your map! Adding a lot of details will make it look more realistic.
Many of the maps we have in the collection are very old. When paper is old, it usually becomes more yellow. You can make your map look old! All you need is a tea bag and some hot water.
Brew some tea. You might want to ask an adult to help you with this. Wait for the tea to cool down! Do not touch the tea bag when it is too hot!
To keep the table from getting wet, you might want to find a surface to put your paper on. I chose a baking sheet.
Before you start, make sure all of your lines and colors are pretty dark, or the tea might wash them away!
Take your tea bag (make sure it is cool enough to touch first!) and use it to wet your paper.
Make sure you get your whole paper wet with your teabag. You can drag it down your paper in long, smooth lines. Don’t worry if you don’t cover your paper evenly – if some spots get more tea than others the final drawing will look more realistically old! Paper does not age evenly. You can even squeeze out more tea over some areas on purpose to get this effect.
Leave your paper to dry. It will take several hours, and it might be best to leave it overnight.
When your paper dries, you should be left with a map that looks much older than the one you started with. You can pretend it is from a long time ago!
Experiment
See how the tea works differently on maps drawn in pencil, ink, markers or crayons. You could also crumple your map before you add the tea to make it look even older!
Write
What does your map help you find? What kind of an adventure could you go on if you followed your map? Since your map is so old, does the place it shows even exist anymore? Write about it the places on your map!