Quick map of my favourite island.

[skymandr]

Hi all! I'm new to this forum, so by way of introduction, I thought I would share a map I made earlier this year:



I'm not much of an artist, and certainly not an experienced map maker, but I will share some of my reflections on the process of making this map below. Hopefully it will be helpful or amusing to someone, but first some background.

I drew this map as part of a (now defunct) bi-weekly challenge set up between me and a friend, where twice a week we set out to do "something creative" based on a semi-randomly chosen word. The word of a week in March this year was "map", which suited me perfectly. I decided to draw a map of an island, and rather than drawing something completely made up, I decided to see how well I could draw the island where I spent my childhood summers. It's a magnificent place, which seems to me to have sprung from the pages of a book of fairy tales, wherefore I opted for a nostalgic fantasy-esque look. I'm an engineer/scientist by trade, which usually colours my approach to map-making. Though I really enjoy the technical aspects of things, for this project I decided to try to relax a bit, and try to make some kind of homage to the Sense of Wonder I used to get (and still do get, on occasion) from maps in my childhood. I found this very liberating and will try to do it again, as a complement to more thorough endeavours.

I started out by sketching the outlines as I remembered them using a soft graphite pencil. Then I marked landmarks, such as towns, a fortress, and the roads as best I could remember them. Then, being a nit-picker and knowing I would be angry with myself if I got it too wrong, I succumbed to the temptation of looking up details of where lakes, surrounding islets and the like are (I spent most of my time near the central fiord when I was there, so that's the region I knew best. I was pleasantly surprised at how well I had captured the outline, but I could not have pulled off a faithful rendition without resorting to this measure.

Once the outline was all there, I drew a more detailed sketch in slightly harder pencil, adding symbols for farms/hamlets, forests and mountains, lighthouses, more roads, and a dragon. I decided at this point not to put place names and the like on the map, my hope being that their absence would make the map more suggestive (also, my hand is very far from neat...). After this, I proceeded with inking, using small nibbed pens for details, and a calligraphy pen for outlines and lettering. Using the calligraphy pen for this was not a good choice, and I knew that, but I couldn't help myself since it was new and I wanted to try it out.

When the island was done, I added a compass and a title, and thought I was done. Then I realised, that I had a strange double-nib for my calligraphy pen, which could be used for making stylised waves, so I decided to try that. I then waited a little to short a while for the ink to dry, before rubbing away the pencil, wherefore unfortunately I smudged some of the details (I probably knew this too, but I'm not very patient...).

Finally, I made a frame, which turned out terrible, and has therefore been removed in the digital version. The whole process took about three hours, from first sketch to scanned and touched up.

Some things that went wrong, or not as well as they could have:

• The choice of paper: I used paper for graphite pens, which is not suitable for inking, since it bleeds. I knew this was a bad idea from my last cartography project (which I may add to the WIP section in the future), but I like the feel of such paper, so I did it anyway. For my next project, I hope to resist the temptation, because it really isn't very practical.
• Using a calligraphy pen: Especially bad idea with this kind of paper, but as I wrote, I wanted to try it out. Unfortunately, this meant that many of the finer details got lost in the ink bleed.
• Coastlines: I can't make up my mind as to how to best represent coastlines. For this map, I made some small hatches along the coast to represent an incline, and drew a line with a finer nib around all islands to indicate shallows, but I'm not happy with this. Perhaps stippling would have been better?
• The waves: I like the waves, but I have to work on spacing.
• Mountains: I'm struggling to find a way of drawing mountains in a simple yet aesthetically pleasing manner, but ...
• ... The forests: Finding a way of representing forests and trees is clearly a more pressing matter that I need to address (again, I think my impatience is partly to blame here).
• Free-handing: My hands are not very precise instruments -- they tend to shake even without three cups of coffee, so I should either learn to stick with working methodically, and not to try free-handing things (such as the compass) or really get to practising it (probably a combination would be best).

That's a lot of self-critique, but to end on a cheerful note, all in all I'm very happy with it. It's a cute map. In particular, I'm happy with how the waves turned out, and I think the lack of lettering does add to the feel of it. The work is licensed under CC: By-SA [0]

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[0]: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ This license applies, though the original blog post [1] mentions another one. Either will do.
[1]: https://eintrittverboten.wordpress.com/2014/03/21/map/ Original blog post - mostly a watered down version of the above.