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Paderborn / DPA
You may have used one at a theme park to find the nearest hair-raising ride, or to plan a walk in magnificent mountain scenery. Pictorial maps lay out your surroundings not as a map, from above, but in an oblique, eagle’s-eye panorama.
Alexander Koenigs is one of the world’s few pictorial map illustrators able to do great panoramas, a master of a rare and painstaking profession. He supplies his work to the tourist industry around the globe. Right now, he is working on a panoramic map of southern Europe’s Adriatic coast. Large areas of card have already been spray painted — blue for the sky, and brown as a grounding for what will become the land.
Koenigs rests on his elbows on a white piece of paper to protect the already completed areas. He dips his paintbrush in watercolour paint, then begins to add in mountaintops, rivers and villages. Koenigs has been painting these enthralling images for 20 years.
“There have been around 100 so far,” he says. But whether they show sweeping coastlines or ski lifts and slopes, they all have one thing in common: “My drawings are always a kind of caricature,” the artist says.
Take the colossal Alpine summit of the Matterhorn, for example. Seen from above on a satellite photograph, it’s almost impossible to identify, because the unique shape of its summit that we know is our sideways view.
For a panoramic map, Koenigs has to combine sideways and top-down: several perspectives in one drawing. It creates the illusion that you are approaching the landscape in an aeroplane, but the features are drawn with outlines that we recognize while standing on the ground.
If theme parks were to hand out real aerial photos, their various rides would be hard to recognize, the pedestrian walks would seem too narrow and the ancillary working areas would seem too big. A real photo taken from a drone shows too much.
Koenigs’ job is to emphasize certain notable features that his clients want accentuated and leave out everything else as he draws the mountain range or the ski resort – just like a caricature.
A camera or a computer could not create so-called “mixed perspective” images like these, because they show landscapes as we think of them in our minds, not the warts-and-all reality. The process of making them is laborious.
First, the 49-year-old travels around the area or flies over it in a plane. Or he analyses aerial and satellite photographs. After the first drafts, which Koenigs coordinates with his clients down to the tiniest detail, the weeks of patient drawing work follow.
It takes him around three months to finish a regional map. The pictorial map is then digitized, so that posters, postcards, or advertising banners can be easily printed. It also means that Koenigs can make subsequent changes, like adding new skilifts, directly on the computer.
Koenigs, who qualified as a geography and art teacher, travels the world for his job. His clients range from the sultan of Oman to a company that leases sailing yachts in the Mediterranean. But his specialist area is South America. At the mention of Chile, the father of two’s eyes light up, although he has also experienced some tricky situations in Chile, which is hostile to Argentina, its eastern neighbour.
“A panoramic map with a view of the Pacific along the coast up to the Andes is not allowed to show any of the hinterland of Argentina,” Koenigs said, describing one of the many restrictions. In one instance, he had to write off a lot of invested time and effort, because his picture showed too much of a mountain on the border.
According to the stipulations of his clients, he should only have drawn the Chilean half of the summit, because the other part belongs to unloved Argentina. Koenigs had to painstakingly amend the picture, remodelling the mountain and removing a centimetre of paint.
Koenigs traces his love of maps to his first geography lesson. The school atlas really sparked something off in him. German hiking guru Manuel Andrack doesn’t quite understand the public’s obsession with pictorial maps. “I’m familiar with these maps as old-fashioned overview maps in the Alpine region, but the panoramic map seems like a fossil to me, about as hip for a hiker as wooden walking sticks.” But Simone Zehnpfennig from the Allgaeu region tourism board in Germany sees things differently. “We currently have three of these maps on issue, even though these are much more expensive to produce than conventional maps.”
The panoramic maps can serve different purposes according to the target audience. “With families, the children often decide where they go. With the help of an illustrated, panoramic map, a child is much better able to imagine what is hidden behind the scenery.” The visual aspect is much more fun for kids, Zehnpfennig says. Alexander Koenigs is also convinced: “Hang a panoramic map next to a normal topographic map at the start of a hiking path. Guess which one you’ll later find all the hikers’ fingerprints on.”
