If you’re an enjoyer of video game maps, you might like this: celebrated artist and cartographer Francesca Baerald – who’s created in-game (and out) maps for Dragon Age, Warcraft, Octopath Traveler, Diablo, Dungeons & Dragons and many more – is releasing a glossy new art book. It’s an oversized, A3 book that features page after page of her sumptuously detailed, hand-painted maps.
Unbound – The Cartography Art Book by Francesca Baerald, as it’s known, is currently being crowdfunded. But it’s already a huge success on Kickstarter, having raised more than four times its £20k goal with weeks to spare. The book includes more than 250 maps from Baerald’s work in video games, tabletop RPGs, board games, and graphic novels.
I can paint like that. Honest.Watch on YouTube
If Baerald’s name is familiar, it might be because I talked to her for a long piece I wrote about the creation of game maps a couple of years ago. What I found especially intriguing about her work was that Baerald creates maps almost exclusively physically, by painting in watercolour, rather than using digital software to create them.
“I believe a perfect map should inspire players and readers from the first glance,” Baerald told me at the time. “I see maps not as instruments to find directions in a game, but as decorated, welcoming doorways that drag you into the game’s world.”
The book is expensive at €150 for a Standard Edition (€250 for a Premium Edition, and €2000 for a wonderfully lavish-sounding Limited Edition, hand-bound in Italy using ancient techniques at a book-binder called Bottega dei Gozzi). But there’s an emphasis on the book’s size and the quality of the prints and paper within it. It’s said to be 99 percent finished, too, although copies won’t ship until next summer.
Fancy it?