How the drawings were made and assembled to make the world's largest and best pirate treasure map.

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It has taken about two and a half years to create the Lost Pirate Gold pirate treasure map and if I had know before hand just how much work would be involved I doubt I would have started. That is probably true of many projects. After a lot of initial work you have to keep going even though there is lots more to do.

The concept was to create a treasure map that could be viewable on multiple layers. I decided on three since that meant I would only need 15,000 maps on the final layer!

Making the drawings 

I was sure all the drawings had to be done by hand or it just wouldn't look right. I dug out an old tubular nib drawing pen that I'd bought 35 years ago and cleaned it out and started on my first sketch of the island.

I spent many hours browsing about on the internet trying to find ideas and examples of artwork. It doesn't take long before you run across great artists like Howard Pyle who painted wonderful pirate themes in the early 1900's.

Before long I had a collection of skulls, weapons, trees and of course a few rotting skeletons.

Pirate corpse

Initial concepts 

I decided that the pirate treasure map should look like it was made on the rolling deck of some captured Spanish galleon, drawn with a scratchy quill and complete with blots, errors, spills and of course blood stains. I didn't want to "borrow" any graphics from other sites or include anything that would look out of place in the 1700's.

The shape of the island was made to fit a grid of 10 squares wide by 15 squares high. This gave 150 maps on the second level each divided again into 100 squares leading to 100 maps on the third level. The total number of maps therefore was:

Level 1: 1 map
Level 2: 150 maps
Level 3: 15,000 maps

Total 15,151 maps

Time to start drawing.

Assembly of drawings 

It soon became apparent I needed some program to arrange the graphics to make all the map segments. The obvious choice is Photoshop but I came across the wonderful fast vector graphics program Xara Xtreme. Not only is it thousands of times faster than Photoshop but it also allows the user to resize and move objects directly on the screen without having to wait for endless calculations to be made. It is also extremly easy to learn how to use and before long I had become very comfortable with it.

Captain's Log

If you work with photos or other forms of graphics I can highly recommend it.

Once I had a collection of drawings I needed to get them from paper into the computer. I didn't own a scanner so I just laid the pages on the floor and photographed them. It was just an experiment but it worked so well I never bought a scanner.

The three other software packages used were Macromedia Fireworks, only because their magic wand tool is so easy to use for removing backgrounds.

Image Cut, to slice up all the images to speed up the loading of the webpages.

Probably the best photo viewer available, Irfanview.

Map jigsaw

Fitting together 1.5 million pieces of a jigsaw puzzle could be more dificult than finding buried treasure!

Keeping Track of Images 

Before long I had thousands of image files and a very large Excel spreadsheet containing all the details of where each image was located on the map. This Excel file was eventually used to create the SQL database that is used on the website.

There is a total of 1.5 million small squares of pirate map on the most detailed 3rd level of the map. I am glad I didn't mess up the database or it would have been almost impossible to piece the map back together again.

More Information on Lost Pirate Gold 

You can find more information on Lost Pirate Gold at these sites
Lost Pirate Gold
Main site of Lost Pirate Gold
Pirate Treasure Map
The first level of the Lost Pirate Gold Treasure Map
Squidoo - The World's Best Pirate Treasure Map
Squidoo Lens on the Lost Pirate Gold Treasure Map
Captain's Log
The pages of clues written in the captain's logbook
Pirate Forum
The Lost Pirate Gold Forum discussing the treasure map and more
Pirate Shop
Get your pirate supplies from the Lost Pirate Gold shop

Pirate Goods from Lost Pirate Gold 

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