Need Maps for Dante's Purgatorio
First things first: I am prepared to pay $500 for the right artist. I realize that's just an honorarium, but it's a worthwhile project: it's the first Dante translation with all the footnotes and all the historical apparatus (including the maps!) right in the text. I will be pitching this book (in a PDF sample canto) to every college in the country that teaches Dante in translation, so if this succeeds and it becomes as textbook, it could open a career for you as an illustrator (and me as an author!) I'll offer a share of the royalties as well, although if you think Dante will make money, you don't know publishing.
I have a published translation of Dante's Purgatorio (https://www.amazon.com/dp/1548946788...cob+rabinowitz) and I am looking to improve it by including maps and genealogies to clarify references in the text. I need 8 unique maps, and another eleven which are the same unique maps with difference type dropped on them, four small family trees and two coats of arms, and a zodiac. The map repetitions are Italy or a blowup of the North: typically any one of these maps will require no more detail than three towns two rivers and a ridge of mountains. I attach a few of my own crude sketches and tracings, which have everything that needs to be included. The object is to make it as easy as possible for the reader to find the details the poem refers to. All the research is completed. All that's needed is the talent.
This could be a job for Inkarnate: it could also work with freehand drawings. France and Italy don't need to be pixel-perfect or precisely to scale. What counts is the mood and the importance of the places mentioned. I'm not picturing precisely traced maps, laboriously masked from their backgrounds, and filled with text twisting on wee little paths around each village.
The new angle of this translation is that Dante's Purgatorio is a 14th century fantasy novel in verse. Fantasy style maps with compass roses and castles and towers would help make this point as visible as it is evident from the text itself.
I need to see a portfolio, you need to see the whole set of sketches. Hopefully we can make some kind of match.
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