Mobile of the World

A couple months ago, I was commissioned to make a mobile in the form of a globe, with continents and oceans. A very clever idea, but it took me a while to find the right way to approach it. At first, I tried to make an accurate depiction of the shapes and sizes of the land masses. This led to many scrapped attempts, as I am not a cartographer. Plus, there was the question of how to represent the bodies of water — I wanted organic blue blobs, but that wouldn't complement the fine detail of the continents. Finally, Rob had a key insight. "You're being too literal," he told me. And with that, the solution became clear. I ditched all the maps I had printed out and just drew the continents freehand on rolled sheets of green polymer clay. Then, I cut oceans from blue clay and arranged them around the continents to make a roughly circular outline. The eastern and western hemispheres each form a separate grouping, and making Greenland and Antarctica white provided nice accents. Here's the result, which ended up around 20 inches wide: