A little Jerry's Map gift for PMG patrons (Patreon)

Hey everyone,

We’ve got a fun surprise cooked up to celebrate the Jerry’s Map documentary with you all and to say one last, massive thank you for helping us tell this story in the first place.You’ve hopefully already seen that we shared the companion video yesterday, which was jam-packed with loads of extra footage that we couldn’t cram into the final cut of the original doc. But today we’ve got something else to give away, which Anni has been rustling up.

Now if you’re in our ‘Let's get physical!’ tier, the one that means you receive bespoke art prints from People Make Games in the post each month, this is something you’re actually going to get your hands on physically. And in fact, we’re not going to start posting these until the 7th July, so there’s still time to sign up to that tier if you’re interested!

But we also wanted to make sure that all of our patrons got the chance to be involved with this, so no matter which tier you’re in, we’re also going to be sharing a digital file for you to play around with, or even print off yourself.

More on that at the end of this post, but first, let me hand over to Anni to explain what she’s been up to...

ANNI: Inspired by Jerry, his work, and the documentary we made, I decided it would be fitting to create a ‘seed panel’ for PMG’s next art print. You might remember that Jerry spoke about the idea of sending out certain panels, like seeds, to get other artists started on their own mapping journey. We thought that sounded like a great theme to explore here.

I had a lot of fun making this, it had been a long time since I worked on something with physical materials in this way and it was such a nice change of pace from working digitally. I used different papers, acrylic paint, coloured pencils and more. It's subtle, but even collaged into the background layers are some notes I made during editing the documentary, as well as some of the emails between Nik (that’s Jerry’s assistant) and myself from the planning stages of this project. I couldn't resist after thinking so much about how Jerry uses old letters and ephemera from his life in his work.

And given that Quinns couldn't quite convince Jerry to add ‘Quinnston’ to his map I thought I’d give him the pleasure of seeing it realised as a brand new map of its own! But there’s a lot still to find out about Quinnston: How far does the city expand? Who lives there? What infrastructure does it have around it? And is that body of water next to it the sea, a lake, or a river… or something else entirely?

I haven’t created any specific rules, that’s up to you to decide! This is really just the starting point of a much bigger map. To make things as easy as possible to get started, in the envelope we send out to our patrons who receive this print physically, we’ll also be sending out a blank A5 card of the same thickness so this can then be used for the next panel.The map can then grow in any direction and just because I’ve stuck to a more typical urban landscape that doesn’t mean that (in true Jerry fashion) you can’t get a bit freaky with it. Maybe it all gets plastered over by some sinister void-like layer, or becomes fractured by all sorts of geometric dimensional weirdness.Do with this whatever your heart, or perhaps your deck of arcane, unknowable cards, tells you to do!

CHRIS: Again, if you’re in the physical art prints tier, we’ll start sending those out from the 7th July onwards, so keep an eye out for your Jerry/Anni’s Map starter kits in the post.

But if you’d like to download a digital version of the seed panel yourself, you can do that right now, today. Here are two versions, depending on your requirements:

This one is print ready, which means it's slightly larger than A5 because it has a 3mm bleed around the edges for printing purposes. So use this one if you plan to print this out yourself. 

Whereas this one is exactly A5 (148 × 210 mm) and is probably the better choice if you’re planning to work on your map digitally and want to end up with a clean, uniform grid of A5 tiles.

But really, it’s up to you. There is no wrong way to approach any of this! Feel free to do whatever you like and we’d love to see any of the panels you end up creating, if you’d like to share them with us.

Speaking of which, if you’re active on the PMG Discord, you can now find a dedicated Jerry’s Map channel over there where you can post photos, or scans, of your own work and take a look at what others are getting up to as well. Maybe find some inspiration, or even a collaborator? Either way, we'd love to see you over there.