Australia, sketched

I went to Regents Park on Saturday in the hope of asking those there watching the Ashes cricket match between England and Australia to draw maps of Australia.

Despite being initally unusure I'd do it (people sitting very close to one another makes it difficult to approach), I met 16 great people all of whom drew a map, which superimposed, becomes:



The maps were drawn by: Michelle, Sam, Dan, Chris, Andrew, Taryn and Dane from Australia, Charles from South Africa, and Rob, Daniel, Phil, Ailsa, Laura, Craig, Luke and Rebecca from the UK.

Here are their maps, individually:

Sketch maps of Latin America

I went to Carnaval del Pueblo a few weeks ago with my map sketch pad in hand. It's the largest Latin American carnival in Europe. After watching the parade, I spent time in Burgess Park looking for people to ask to draw a map of Latin America.

Lots of lovely people obliged me. I collected 26 maps - I've superimposed 17 of those on top of each other to create this map:



The maps were drawn by: Paula from Argentina, David from Israel, Renato from Brazil, Anthony from Australia, Robin from Colombia, Itala from Brazil, Ivan from Ecuador, German from Colombia, Marcia from Brazil, Angel from Brazil, Jean Bryan from Bolivia, Claudia from Brazil, Simone from Brazil, Adolfo from Brazil, Matt from UK, Natasha from UK, Arianna from Italy, Lisbet from Cuba, Justin from USA, Germaine from UK, Roberto from Puerto Rica, Marcos from Cyprus, Dhannshka from Sri Lanka, Adriana from Colombia, Freddy from Ecuador & Leyre from Spain.

Thanks to all of them! When I started to superimpose these, I found that between 10 and 15 maps work best (26 is way too many!). I had to leave a few out of these, simply as they were too cluttered.

These are the maps individually:

Next: Maps of Australia by Ashes cricket watchers, and I'm going to attempt to superimpose some very differnt maps of South-East Asia

Roma twitter

When I was in Rome, I made a special trip to see a small, almost ignored statue in the corner of a small square. It's called Pasquino, and is in Piazza di Pasquino.

The ancient statue, which probably dates to the 3rd century BC, was dug up when paving part of Rome. In 1501, on April 25, Saint Mark's Day, a cardinal draped the statue in a toga, and attached epigrams in Latin to it.

A custom soon arose for those who wanted to criticize the Pope or individuals in his government to write satirical poems in broad Roman dialect and attach them to this statue.

Pasquino was, thus, Rome's first talking statue (and many more appeared), and a neat Roman-style Twitter. Even today, satirical notes are attached to the statue.