David Parkland is a proposal writer and map maker, who qualified as a cartographer at the Royal School
of Military Survey. He is currently seeking representation for his first novel, as well as producing bespoke
maps for other authors and personal clients. He lives in Holmfirth, England. www.davidparkland.com
“
being asked
to spend eight
hours a day
drawing contour
lines by hand was
about as close to
Nirvana as I was
ever likely to get
last detail about the terrain under their feet.
Just pray the batteries don’t run out before you
get back to camp.
I joined the army when I was twenty, hoping
to be a rifleman. Somebody caught me with
a drawing pad and before I knew it, I was
training as a draughtsman and cartographer.
I’m old enough to have been taught
cartography the old fashioned way – with
Rotring pens on plastic sheets, using a ruler
to draw curved lines and erasing mistakes
with a scalpel. Two millimetres out on the
drawing table would mean an error of a couple
hundred metres on the ground, depending
on the scale, so accuracy and neatness were
paramount. “You need to work more neatly.
Tighten up your pen work” was the daily
mantra from the instructors.
At night I went to art school to develop life
drawing and illustration skills, where I was
told, “you need to work more spontaneously.
Free up your pencil.”
You might think that I would have had
enough of cartography after years of being
hunched over a light table, but, in the middle
of all that meticulous work, I discovered a
genuine sense of flow. It’s no great surprise to
me that adult colouring books are becoming
so popular, because they offer more or less the
same experience. For me, being asked to spend
eight hours a day drawing contour lines by
hand was about as close to Nirvana as I was
ever likely to get.
Twenty years later, and I’m still mapping.