EmoriaCustom art prints and star maps
Maps · Collection 01

Victoria poster, drawn from the real map

48.4284°N / 123.3656°W · Canada

Water holds three edges of the sheet, and the city takes what is left: a point. Nowhere is there ten yards of straight shoreline.

You choose the framing, the palette and the words of the caption. The work is drawn from real data, then printed to order in the workshop closest to you.

Compose my Victoria poster
What the map shows

A point between two straits, and a harbour that enters the town

Start with the channel. It opens to the south-west, narrows, turns twice and ends a few streets from the engraved point: that is the inner harbour, and on its own it explains why the centre is here. To the west a second body of water cuts inland the other way. To the east the coast breaks into coves and islets, enough of them that you stop being sure where the mainland ends. The bottom of the sheet is an open strait: that is the side you look out from.

Read on

No ferry, no rail line: the links that keep this point alive have no existence on a plan. The provincial legislature and the great hotel on the harbour are only two footprints among others here. Green, on the other hand, holds: the park along the southern front makes a frank mass between the streets and the strait. The subject of this print is not a monument but a line of coast, and it repeats itself nowhere.

Compose your own

What suits Victoria

The palette

The subject of this sheet is a boundary, the one between water and land, and it is absurdly long: every cove and every islet adds to it. So take a clean contrast between the two, with nothing in between, or the shoreline blurs and the point stops being visible. Green here genuinely exists, in frank enclaves rather than as a continuous ground: let it live in the south and the east, it holds the sheet down. And keep the streets pale: they are not the subject, they are what fills the point.

The framing

Portrait, the point in the lower half and water on three edges. The engraved coordinates mark downtown, which is not the right middle: centred on them, the frame cuts off the islets to the east, and those are what make this coast recognisable. So the centre is raised and shifted east. At the top, the inland suburb can leave without loss: it says nothing the weave has not already said.

The caption

The title, one line under it, the coordinates. The name of a cove, a jetty number, the date of a crossing: on a map made of hollows, one line is enough to point at yours.

The sheet
Subject
Victoria, Canada
Palette
Chêne de Garry
Map style
Clean and Detailed
Layout
Header
Typeface
Dedication
Framing
Zoom 11.4
Fade at the edges
0%
Format
Portrait
The palette of this poster

Chêne de Garry

Sixteen inks, in the configurator’s order. It is not in the catalogue, but you will find it in the palette library, filed under its material.

  • Background
  • Water
  • Greenery
  • Built-up areas
  • Roads
  • Buildings
  • Text
  • Motorways
  • Main roads
  • Secondary roads
  • Minor roads
  • Streets
  • Service roads
  • Paths
  • Railways
  • Borders
Compose with this paletteStart from it to make your own

Opens the colour workshop with these 16 inks in place: change one, keep the rest.

It will wait in your account, ready for any piece.

What the drawing tells

Three dates that explain the city

1843A fort placed against an advance

The Hudson's Bay Company built Fort Victoria on a harbour of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, an outpost facing the American advance on the Pacific. The site chosen was a sheltered anchorage at the head of a channel, and that channel is the one your eye follows through the middle of the sheet. The town did not begin with a street or a square: it began with somewhere a ship could be put out of the weather.

1858Twenty-five thousand arrivals in a town of six hundred

The Fraser gold rush broke over the place. Some twenty-five thousand prospectors passed within weeks through a town of about six hundred people; a camp of more than two hundred shacks and tents went up in six weeks, and the price of a lot went from five dollars to a thousand. None of that episode shows on the map, and yet it is what turned a trading post into a city.

1860The palisade comes down, the capital arrives

The palisade of the fort was pulled down in 1860, the city incorporated two years later, and Victoria became the capital of British Columbia at the union of the two colonies. It is a capital placed at the tip of an island, apart from the territory it governs, and the map shows that better than a sentence could: water all round, and the mainland outside the frame.

Before ordering

The four questions people ask

Can I choose any place, any date?

Yes. The search covers the whole world, from a capital to a hamlet. For the Sky collection, any date works, past or future: the sky is calculated.

What sizes do you offer?

From 21 × 29.7 cm to 84.1 × 118.9 cm, that is A4 to A0, portrait or landscape depending on the material. Every size is shown with its price in the editor.

What materials do you offer?

Four, from the barest to the most dressed.

  • Matte fine art paperA 200 gsm art paper with a deep matte finish: the bare print, to frame as you please.
  • Wooden hangersThe print suspended between two wooden hangers, ready to hang, in the spirit of studio posters.
  • The classic frameThe print mounted under acrylic glass in a slim frame, assembled by hand, delivered ready to hang.
  • Framed canvasThe piece printed on canvas, stretched over a wooden stretcher bar and set in a frame: a gallery presence.
How long does it take?

Allow 1 to 4 working days for making, up to 7 for hand-assembled frames and canvases, then 1 to 6 working days in transit with standard delivery.

Digital editions are available immediately: the file of your piece is emailed to you as soon as you order.

All the questions

Your Victoria

The cove where you used to stop, the walk round the park facing the strait, the berth you leave from for the mainland. The coast is the same for everyone. The hollow that is yours is not.

Compose my Victoria poster