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

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.

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.

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.



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.



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

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.