Hello friends! Feels like forever since I made a WIP thread… which I may have said before… but here is one! Yay!

So I started planning a city map a couple of days ago, and today I got some work done. I'm making a map of my home town, Gothenburg in Sweden, as it looked in its… well, not its infancy maybe, but… teens. Or something. Gothenburg was founded in the early 17th century as a planned fortified city. No original structures are left, most of the fortifications are gone, the canals are turned into streets, so not a lot of the origins can be seen anymore. But I guess that's what makes it fascinating to me. That it's gone.

Anyway, the reason I'm making this map now is because my dad often talks about how sad it is that everything was torn down and that the canals were filled, and his birthday is next month, so I thought a nice big poster map of our home town could be a decent gift. Therefore this will be slightly different to my usual method; I almost always label maps digitally, and most of the time I do quite a lot of tweaks, add separately painted elements, etc... but I don't want to give away a print, so I'll be doing everything by hand this time.

This is how far I've come. I've based this on various maps of the early city, but none that I found could show how the inner yards (that the right word?) of the blocks looked like, so those are improvised based on contemporary maps of other cities.
göteborg1.jpg

I was thinking I would ink this with red for the building outlines, blue for the shores, and black for other stuff, and use a pale but colorful and happy color scheme. But maybe I'll go with more muted browns, greens and grays instead and keep all line work black. I'll do some color sketches next, try some stuff out.