Hand Drawn Fictional City Maps
 

My name is Michael smith and I have been drawing maps for as long as I can remember. I originally found this site looking for other hand drawn maps and in 2006 I found the hand drawn maps thread which I can no longer find. I am currently scanning all my old maps on a 11X17' scanner and then joining the images in Gimp or power point.

This is the City of Cod Port. This is my oldest map from 1987.
http://i111.photobucket.com/albums/n...sterMapRAW.jpg

This is the city of Reedsburg. I drew this map around 1993 or 1994. My drawing style is mostly based off of the Hagstrom street maps of the NY area.

http://i111.photobucket.com/albums/n...RGCITYGIMP.jpg

I've doodled a few, but nothing as awesome and thorough as this. Wow!

Thank you for the comment. For the longest time I kept these maps to myself thinking that others would find them weird. In the past few months I have found so many other fictional maps from people all over the world.

Loushroute
 

This is the city of Loushroute. The original map is 44X52" (3 poster boards).I drew this map in 1998. I was collecting a lot of Canadian Map Art street maps then so I colored in all the built up areas. The water staining on the bottom of most of my maps is from a damaged water pipe that burst while they were in public storage while I was deployed to Iraq in 2005. I had to throw out a lot of my sketch books and almost threw out my maps because of water damage.

http://i111.photobucket.com/albums/n...TROGIMPIII.jpg

WOW! Very impressive work. I too have done fictional city map drawings, but never anything as vast and detailed as what you've accomplished. Would it be possible to upload larger versions of these drawings so I can see some of the nitty gritty details like names you've put in? If not I understand. :)

Fictional cities are an unexplored art, in my opinion. I could get hours of entertainment looking at others' visions of imagined cities. The more realistic, the better. I especially love seeing the way local and imagined culture is integrated into the city.

Thank you for uploading and sharing, and if you have more I'd love to see it!

Louhroute Hi Res
 

This file is 39MB. I am just getting used to working with gimp. I am not sure if there is a better way to scan high resolution and keep the file size down. This map consists of 12, 11X17" images at 600 dpi.
http://i111.photobucket.com/albums/n...EMETROGIMP.png

Wow, this is very very cool. I actually dabble in this from time to time when I'm bored, but I can never really invest more than a week into a map, so I never really complete any. I finally completed one in early 2011 after working on it for a couple months, then tried starting another towards the end of my completing that first one, but to this day it sits incomplete. There was one in 2010 that I almost completed, though. Yes, I often think people would find something like this weird, so I tend not to share it with others. None of mine are as thoroughly detailed as yours, though.

Avaranchi City
 

Avaranchi City is a map I drew in 1998 after leaving the Regular Army and FT Bliss, TX.

http://i111.photobucket.com/albums/n.../AVARANCHI.jpg

I think all of my maps are unfinished and lately I also have a hard time to sit down and finish them or make new ones. I do have plans to make more. A lot of my co-workers are into fantasy baseball or football so I guess this is more productive and requires more imagination.

Wow those are very realistic. Mine go back and forth from realism and map influenced to a sort of abstract, organic, look. They're not intended to be realistic, and I sometimes find myself drawing because the patterns look nice, rather than when I do a bit of a story in my head. The drawing at the bottom was my biggest. A friend of mine who is a professional artist, and who attended the Art Institute of Chicago with me, has it now.

https://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphot...392_9593_n.jpg

https://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphot...382_9763_n.jpg

https://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphot...292_5980_n.jpg

Xing, thanks for posting these. Your maps were the ones I first saw on the hand drawn maps thread about six years ago. I tried posting there as Easky30. Still cant find that thread. There are a lot of fictional map sites and pages now.

http://fictionalmaps.wordpress.com/

http://fictionalcity.wordpress.com/

http://urbangeofiction.stadtkreation.com/

It is great to see that there are so many others that are into fictional mapping and all the different their drawing styles.

I've been working on one lately, hand-drawn first and then digitized. I do most of my maps in Inkscape as opposed to hand-drawn. I rarely actually finish them...

My current project, laid out on the floor; the colours and lines were added afterward in Inkscape to give me a general idea of where I am going next with the map.
http://i.imgur.com/dGI0cDF.jpg

Close up of two panels:

http://i.imgur.com/8Ky81at.jpg

These will be scanned in and stitched together, and then traced in Inkscape to create a map that looks something like this:

http://i.imgur.com/zCdpPaI.png
This one is based on my city's downtown, flipped horizontally and rotated about 270°. It's a map in progress; I'm slowly going through it to add parking lots. The green ones on the right reflect a different street grid I originally had in that location.

A fictional map I drew a few years ago:

http://i.imgur.com/VCibNjw.jpg

A map I did several days later:

http://i.imgur.com/N9txBcF.jpg

And it's digitized variant, an on-going but slow-moving project. That airport has basically developed in real time... You can see how different the map is now, compared to my original hand-drawn version.

http://i.imgur.com/wvl6UdB.jpg

This one is a fictional map that I have used in the past to test colour pallets and techniques. I have developed a comprehensive colour scheme and iconography for my maps.

http://i.imgur.com/GPG7yBd.jpg

A hand drawn map in my notebook while looking for work a couple years ago:

http://i.imgur.com/HImmKPm.jpg

This map is one of the oldest I've got, it is using the geography my city is located in, but re-centered and with a different street plan. I was wondering what it might be like if the city was located in a different spot within the valley.

http://i.imgur.com/9Nz0Fbg.jpg

I made this one for the fictional town of Haddonfield, Illinois. Okay, so I didn't draw it on paper. But I still made it - and it is fictional!

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4137/...f62e8f33_b.jpg

I posted on Facebook the last time I drove through the town where one of the movies eludes to Haddonfield being located. I made sure it was close to Halloween that day in Odell Illinois. Cool map!

Valgary City
 

This map I did in 1990 or 1991. http://i111.photobucket.com/albums/n...YCITYCROP2.jpg

North Bay
 

I drew this map in 1993 while I was stationed at FT Leonard Wood, MO. This map was based off of the Army 1:50,000 scale topo maps.
http://i111.photobucket.com/albums/n...s/NORTHBAY.jpg

Some really amazing maps. What program did you use to make the university map? It reminds me of the Map Art maps from Canada.

vid,
Is the above map hand drawn? I really like the contour lines.

That map isn't hand drawn, it's vector, drawn in Inkscape.

My designs are heavily inspired by the MapArt map style, I have a decent collection of their stuff. They're not producing much anymore, unfortunately. :(

I have a few Map Art maps and atlases from 1990. I am mostly inspired by the Hagstrom maps and the Ordnance Survey maps of Ireland. The original DeLorme atlases were another favorite of mine.
I recently downloaded Inkscape so I may try to make some maps using it.