Murg and surroundings - fictional Swiss style topographic map

[Meton]

All right, I've been working on multiple commissioned maps lately, and I'd be happy to share some maps here too!

This map in question was drawn last May. It was fun commission, as I got to draw a fictional but realistic map, which are my favourite type of maps. The map depicts a imaginary area in Switzerland.



- Hand drawn map, A4 sized paper
- Linework with Micron and some other fineliners
- Coloured and shaded with Copic markers.

The starting point and main idea in this map are the toponyms. The one commissioning me was a university teacher, who ordered the map to give as a gift to a person who were just about to finish their PhD studies. The PhD work was about certain Swiss toponyms, from which the names in this map were also picked from. The selection of names and their suitable uses and locations were given as a list, and I designed the area based on that.

I've been looking forward to make a large-scale map with contours and hillshading for some time, so it was really fun to draw this map! With the style I took inspiration from Swiss topographic maps, which probably have my favourite style of all different national topographic maps. I tried to include the way the cliffs are drawn too, but I'm not entirely sure if I succeeded in it. The colours are meant to represent grassland/cultivated land/meadows (light green), forests (dark green) and mountaineous grass or shrub (light brown). The shading was surprisingly hard to get look good on top of the other colours, but I think the result is quite nice.

I'm happy to hear what you think about the map!

Mikael

[KaiAeon]

This looks really good!