Vintage Town Map Recreated

Goal: Recreate a Vintage Map of the Town I Live In:

I live in a small incorporated town in Montgomery County Maryland called Garrett Park. I have always loved maps and there is a framed 1891 version map of Garrett Park in a hallway above our Post Office. Getting a copy off this map turned out to be impossible, so I set out to recreate it on my own.

Adobe Photoshop (PSD) (or other image editor)

Adobe Illustrator (AI) (or other vector based app that supports bezier curves)

Downloads from the Maryland State Archives Website

The first goal was to find scanned versions of the Garrett Park map from the 1800's. I found these via the Maryland State Archives website (a lot of hunting and pecking from there). There were two black and white scanned TIFF's I downloaded to my MacBook Pro.

While these files were only 235 KB, they turned out to be 27" x 20" 300 dpi bitmapped images. This provided a very solid foundation to create future large images to print. The next step was to put the two maps (Section 1 file and the Section 2 files) into one PSD file.

Each file was opened in PSD, the Image Mode changed from Bitmap to Grayscale and unlocking the layer. The white background in this file was selected and deleted leaving only the black portions on a transparent background. This was accomplished using the Magic Wand tool with the Tolerance set to "2", "Anti-alias" unchecked and "Contiguous" unchecked to avoid any grayscale dithering. Any dithering of the line art in this project would ruin the vintage effect. The Canvas Size of first file was changed to double the Width and the Anchor was set to the center left "box". The second image PSD layer was then dragged to the right side of the first file. Now each Map Section were in one PSD file.

Each element (e.g. builder notes, titles, compass, etc.) were put in separate layers within the PSD file. The two maps were proportionally the same with a few overlapping elements when they were brought together. The duplicate elements in Section 2 were removed using the Lasso Tool (0 Feather & Anti-alias unchecked) and Eraser Tool (Mode: Block).

This provided the foundation for the map, albeit a black and white image. The next steps involved creating the color backgrounds to represent the lots, shoulders, roads, and parks within the map. The PSD map layer was placed in an AI file. It is important not to size the map image once it is placed in AI as the AI layers will be placed/pasted into the PSD file and must match the PSD image size. I then used the Pen Tool in AI to painstakingly trace the lots into a layer. This process was repeated to create a road shoulders layer, then the roads into a layer and lastly the parks into a layer.

This was the most time consuming part of this project. Each of these layers were filled with a color closely matching the framed Garrett Park map. These layers were then copied and pasted as separate layers into the PSD file containing the black and white original TIFF images. The transparency of each PSD layer from AI was set to 50% and lined up under the map layer. The original black map layer remained on top of the imported AI layers.

The last feature I wanted to add was a tea stained paper / parchment paper bottom layer. I found a number of tutorials on YouTube to create this effect in PSD. The parchment paper layer I created was added as the bottom layer of the PSD file. The other elements (compass, notes, seal, etc.) from the original TIFF files were placed around the map.

With the background added, I sent two JPG files to an online print service to get to prints:

• 24" x 36" on Canvas
• 16" x 20" on Canvas

I did not track the hours this project took, as I worked on it from time to time over two years. This project would sit idle for months at a time as life and work took priority. It was quite the thrill to finish and even more so when the first print arrived.