Photography by Dave Brown; Eddy Gores; Owen Harvey; Paul Marc Mitchell; Euan Myles Sign up for . For the latest news, follow us on , , and . A team of three cartographers begins a commissioned globe by customizing a digital map that will later be printed on paper.
“Country names and capital cities stay,” Bellerby says. “Everything else is up for grabs.” Tweaks on paper can include highlighting places of personal significance or plotting the route of a meaningful journey.
The artists can also include a range of custom illustrations and decorations, from birds and flowers to ships and lighthouses. The printing quality is of such high resolution that the text can go down to 0.5-size font for the smallest globes.
On such examples “you need a magnifying glass to read it,” he adds. Bellerby’s largest globes are made on England’s south coast from glass-reinforced polymer and are shipped to London in two halves. Smaller models are made in-house from resin, also in two parts.
In both cases, after the hemispheres are joined, a compass is used to draw latitudinal positioning lines, which guide the application of the paper map. Once the map is printed, it’s cut by hand into sections called gores. These portions, which are shaped either like a long marquise diamond or the same stone cut in half, are removed from the page with a scalpel—a fitting tool given the surgical precision required.
An artist applies the initial layers of color to the cut gores, filling in the oc.