Unnamed Mercator World Map

[Gidde]

My first project since the hard-drive-wipe. I'm inspired to do something along the lines of Mercator's 1569 World Map, but there's no way I'm going to get that kind of artistry out of it, so I'm going with a celtic knotwork border instead of the myriad of pictures he's got.

I still haven't decided whether the final product will be actual ink-and-watercolor, or digital, so what I have so far is the plan for the knotwork, and part of the map layout. The greyscale nature is to facilitate tracing onto watercolor paper if I go that route; it's much easier to keep track of which lines are down if one uses a ball-point pen over a relatively light original (after coating the back with graphite).

The world map is spliced together from a few different planetgen outputs; the poles are at equal scale to each other and in stereographic projection; the knotwork is hand-designed but cookie-cuttered into place, which is why it doesn't quite match up in some places. I'm rather proud of the fact that each piece is a single band (which is harder than I thought it would be to do).

Still need to plan out the rhumb lines (which oddly, Mercator seemed to put in at random wherever he had room), fishies and ships and monsters, text areas, and the main cartouche. Oh, and the map itself lol. While I dither about whether I want to go analog or digital

A final note: one of these days I'm going to finish a world map and be happy enough with it that it will actually go into a novel, so please don't use this (or what it evolves into) for anything but personal games and whatnot. Thanks!