elgigab amicko whytnee
Giovanni Sealy
I could probably figure out how to do one, but I have to do like, 30 of these and I want to learn how to make it quick and painless. My first thought was using Live Trace in Illustrator, but I'm not terribly good at that yet.
It does have pretty good instructions that show up when you open up the website.Those instructions can be accessed at any point with the help button at the bottom of Map style panel ( shown in the image below ).
They're virtually identical but their license (Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike) explicitly allows this sort of thing including for commercial work, so long as they're credited and you share the work you make with their data under the same licence, whereas Google are strict about usage of their maps unless you pay for an expensive license.
Edit: the earlier version of this answer recommended using Open Street Map (OSM)'s export to PDF and SVG tools. I'd now recommend against fighting with these: they're junk. Not only are the files produced a mess (see edit history for examples - and the latest don't even open for me), but the tools almost never work, failing with a hopelessly misleading error message about "server load" being too high (
There's a wiki with loads of alternate options, but all of these I've tried either don't work (many of them), don't work for anything except a close up of a few streets (MapOSMatic), give grainy pixel images in a PDF rather than actual vectors (Field Papers and Walking Papers), or where the "installation" process is more like configuring an entire server (most of them)...
Note that if you want real vectors you must download then open the export from OSM rather than just browsing around in the default map that shows when you load up Maperitive - else it'll give you a fake SVG full of chopped up low quality bitmap tiles.
In addition to the great suggestions already mentioned take a look at I created a library/directory of free, high quality city maps that are editable and layered. Choose from either .SVG or .AI file formats for use in Adobe Illustrator or Inkscape.
Depending on how detail you want to go into.. I have used ArcGIS which is really quick and good for simple stuff, I think more complex stuff has a bit of a learning curve but well worth it. -us/arcgis/products/maps-for-adobecc/overview
In the previous issue, I shared the latest podcast episode, a fascinating conversation with Liz Steel about her journey from architecture to urban-sketching, being a full-time creative, and the various ways to make art easy again.
Remaining inconspicuous has been an important feature of my art, for different reasons over the years. When I started, the main reason was that I was too terrible/ashamed with my drawings and did not want anyone to see them. I was also generally embarrassed by the idea of drawing from observation in public places. Today, while that feeling is long gone, thanks to the urban sketching community, I enjoy being sneaky for other reasons. Being sneaky in the pursuit of art challenges me to find new and interesting points of view even in busy urban spaces. Sometimes it affects where I sit, and sometimes it affects who/what I choose to draw. In every case, it affects my work positively by keeping the experience fresh, unpredictable and challenging.
With this newsletter, I share thoughts from the podcast, and notes about my journey of self-education as an artist. I hope you will enjoy it. And if you do, please share it with another person who might like it too!
I was on Granville Island this weekend to draw a family portrait on commission. It was a spot the family liked very much, with the Burrard Bridge behind them. The drawing was fun to do and we had a nice chat as I worked. I picked up great suggestions for places to see around Vancouver.
This weekend I hosted a couple of drawing workshops for beginners. I did some demos for how I draw people/portraits with reference pics from r/redditgetsdrawn. It reminded me of all the practice I have gotten over the years from Reddit. So later this week, when I was sitting around at home, in need of inspiration, I returned to r/redditgetsdrawn and made a bunch of drawings with my fountain pen. Read my post about this drawing, and a short history of my art journey with RedditGetsDrawn.
I think this drawing helped me understand why I prefer the vertical format for certain scenes. And I wonder if other artists choose sketchbooks the same way, knowingly or otherwise. More thoughts on the subject, with side-by-side sketches of street scenes, on my blog.
You can also watch this video of how I made the drawing. The way I navigate the page offers good ideas to tackle the perspective challenge. Maybe someone insightful can also tell what my weak points are, from looking at how I actively negotiate the scene.
I define SneakyArt as the practice of drawing beauty from my environment without drawing attention. I make my art in public spaces, observing human activity and interaction. I don\u2019t tell the subjects that I have drawn them, and they never find out. Everything is very hush hush.
Both children sat very quietly while I drew them, without any expression on their faces. It reminded me of how people used to have pictures taken until a few decades ago. It made me smile because of the innocence of that behavior. I expect their father told them to \u201Cbehave themselves for the artist\u201D and they took it far more seriously than necessary.
Felix (age 6) relaxed and opened up after I told him about how I draw, and invited him to look at my page and my other sketchbooks. He began to tell me about his latest drawings - which feature his toys and favorite cartoons. I think that\u2019s exactly what I was drawing at his age too!
I\u2019ve been meaning to draw a street-view from my apartment in the new sketchbook. And I realized\u2026 the horizontal page format changes everything! It\u2019s a completely different challenge from drawing in a vertical page format.
Next week, I\u2019ll share a new, super exciting episode of the podcast. I think you will learn a lot from listening to it, and understand better the why of drawing on location, instead of just the how.
Update: I have been asked several times over the years for help on this. In response I have made a simple GUI tool, given a list of addresses and a download folder location, will download all of the images. Applications are websites listing properties and marketers for mailings.
Second are a few functions. The first, MetaParse, grabs the date (Month and Year) and pano_id from a particular street view image. Because if you submit just a slightly different set of lat-lon, google will just download the same image again. To prevent that, we do a sort of memoization, where we grab the meta-data first, stuff it in a global list PrevImage. Then if you have already downloaded that image once, the second GetStreetLL function will not download it again, as it checks the PrevImage list. If you are doing a ton of images you may limit the size of PrevImage to a certain amount, but it is no problem doing a few thousand images as is. (With a free account you can IIRC get 25,000 images in a day, but the meta-queries count against that as well.)
Now we are ready to download images running along an entire street. To get the necessary coordinates and header information I worked it out in a GIS. Using a street centerline file I regularly sampled along the streets. Based on those sample points then you can calculate a local trajectory of the street, and then based on that trajectory turn the camera how you want it. Most social science folks I imagine want it to look at the sidewalk, so then you will calculate 90 degrees to the orientation of the street.
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