Marion illustrator marries passion for mapping, history with depictions of Civil War battles

Robert North makes maps for a living, but he doesn't consider himself a cartographer.

'I consider myself an illustrator, and my illustrations are mostly maps,' he says.

From his home studio in Marion, he uses a giant tablet-like computer to digitally hand draw tiny trees, people and buildings.

His maps are bird's eye view renderings, mostly of present-day campuses and resorts. Those pay the bills, but recently he's turned his skills to a less contemporary but more captivating topic — Civil War battlefields.

In October, he completed a detailed depiction of the Battle of Gettysburg, the war's bloodiest battle. The map took him two years to create, after hours of reading and research, including a trip to the National Archive in Washington, D.C. and the purchase of period typeface to fill out the graphics.

The finished product is a colorful scene dotted with facts about the battle, troop movements, battlefield landmarks and other tidbits of information.

He has printed the map onto a fold out brochure available for sale online on Amazon and through Facebook. He's working to get it into gift shops in the town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where a regular stream of tourists come to see the spot many consider the turning point of the Civil War.

'It's a memento for people who visit the battlefield, or for people to hang on their walls, in their kids bedrooms or in their dens,' he says.

He's now working on a second map, of the Battle of Antietam. Eventually, he'd like to add the Battle of Vicksburg and a map of the eastern states that were involved in the war.

He said the maps are a chance to meld his passion for history with the skills he's developed during 30 years of map design.

'As I was researching, I didn't find anything like this. You see all kinds of tactical maps, but I didn't see anything three dimensional,' he said. 'It was kind of an inspiration for me. I could kind of have it come to life, whereas a lot of military maps are very simply done, with squares and arrows.'

He did take some artistic license, adding in extra trees, emphasizing the rolling hills and reducing the number of soldiers he depicted.

'I have thousands of little guys running around shooting at each other,' he said. 'I tried to make that as accurate as possible, but to have 70,000 men on each side would have been a convoluted mess.'

Each of the soldiers he did include are actually all one person. North photographed his cousin, a Civil War re-enactor, in dozens of poses. Using Adobe Photoshop he outfitted in in uniforms from both sides of the Masion Dixon Line and pasted him all over the map. The images are so small, though, that you can't tell the thousands of tiny soldiers on the field are all the same man.

He said he aimed for a balance of historical accuracy and keeping the display aesthetically pleasing. He says he wants the maps to be both educational and accessible.

'It's really been a labor of love,' he says.

Learn more   For more information, go to

Facebook.com/GettysburgIllustrated- BattleMap.