I’ve been working on a story about my maps for the Washington Post as of late. I am quite excited about the story and I’m looking forward to it’s publication. However I’ve completely stopped making any new maps, instead I’ve been porting all of my existing maps to my on-line store.

The process to move my maps from storage to the the store is rather simple: open up my previously made maps, resize them (from 18,000×12,000 to 9,000×6,000 – 216 megapixels to 54 megapixels), and save them as a .jpg, then upload them to the store. While the process appeared quite easy at first, it’s taken f.o.r.e.v.e.r! What I’ve realized is that I need to get a new computer.

On my computer it takes roughly 30 minutes to open the original map, 15 minutes to resize it, and another 15 minutes to save it. Nearly an hour for each map. Thankfully my friend Alicia just received a new iMac G5 and has been gracious enough to let me bring my external hard drives over to her place and let me process the maps on her computer. It only takes 3 minutes to open, resize, and save each map! From one hour to 3 minutes flat. Ummm, yeah, I see a new computer on the horizon….

The upside of her computer’s processing speed is that I’ve been able to make a few new derivative maps in the process. Originally when I started making the Mandala Projections I would use a special round light to create the circle. This is why in some of my older mandalas the lighting appears to fade at the edges.

A few months ago I figured out a way to simply take an existing Quilt Projection map and cut out a perfect circle in Photoshop. This allows me to make a mandala out of any of my old maps quite easily. The next few postings are some of the maps I made while processing the maps for the on-line store.