The Art of Map Illustration

James Gulliver Hancock feels sick when he's not drawing. He panics that he may not be able to draw everything in the world... at least once. His obsession with re-imagining his world has seen him work for major print, TV, and music publishing releases, including Coca-Cola, Ford Motors, Herman Miller, Businessweek Magazine, The New York Times, and Simon&Schuster. He has participated in projects in the USA, the UK, Indonesia, Austria, Germany, France, and Australia, taking his whimsical perception around the world.James grew up in Sydney, Australia, and studied visual communications at the University of Technology, Sydney. In kindergarten, he remembers devising the most complex image he could think of: refusing to move on to the next activity after painting, instead detailing a complex drawing of a city of houses including every detail, every person, and every spider web between every house. He still has the drawing.In high school, James discovered technical drawing. He has always been obsessed with machines and the way things work, and rendering the meeting of tiny screws in perfect perspective was a delight. This is now married with a love of color, paint, and controlled mess, as well as connecting it to deeper conceptual and philosophical meaning.James has traveled extensively, including an overland journey from Sydney to London via Southeast Asia, China, Japan, Russia, and Europe. Rolling in a typhoon in the sea between Japan and Russia, he wondered how he'd save his sketchbook when the ship sank. He undertook artist residencies all over Europe and most recently has been living in New York, where he has worked for a wide variety of high-profile clients and taken the city by storm with his personal project, www.allthebuildingsinnewyork.comCurrently he works out of two studios: one in The Pencil Factory in Brooklyn, New York, and from his homeland studio by the beach in Sydney, Australia.