Hello everyone! After a journey through the Make a Difference Boot Camp with Enterprise Manager Amy, the time has finally come for me to go back to fantasy map normality for a while.
But first, let's do some backtracking to the start of the project.
At the end of May, just before the start of Bootcamp, I decided to start a new series where I am going to be doing some smaller projects alongside the Youtubia continent project, drawing random fantasy maps from different eras. The subject of the first post of this series is going to be the town of Somerville, a minimalist, modern city map drawing.
What is the city of Somerville?
Somerville is a mid-sized town of approximately 55,000 people on the banks of the Lea River. The town centre is very popular with tourists, with a plethora of narrow alleyways and old buildings dating back to the 13th century, and gains inspiration from the alleyways of the Spanish city of Barcelona. The old town was used as a crucial defence position in many battles that took place during the 17th century, due to its location along the meandering river.
The industrial areas and suburbs in town were primarily built during the Industrial era, with the most modern residential areas being built in the 1990s. There are two industrial parks in Somerville - the units on the Somerville Industrial Estate are mostly occupied by companies that specialise in logistics, as well as food and furniture manufacturing and home renovation firms, whereas the Woolverstone Industrial Estate, located east of the old town, is a technology park, primarily employing skilled IT, administration and marketing workers.
In the north-west of the town, you can find the stadium of the Somerville Town Football Club (located in the aptly named Stadium Suburb), which has a seated capacity of over 15,000 people, and is sometimes used for music concerts on non-matchdays.
Process of drawing the maps
To start off the project, I decided to do the hand-drawing process for Somerville in one iteration by drawing a single line representation of the town's streets first. This way, when it's time to do the digital map drawings, I have an idea of the town's layout to go from.
Hand-drawing of Somerville
Now that I have a clear idea of what my map is going to look like, it's time to get onto the computer and do some work. For the page size, I decided to use 360x235mm (with A4 being the initial reference point) as the size of the illustration - that way, there is space for the legend and the map title.
Once that is done, I would then overlay the map on a separate layer called Map Background, with the Core Background layer being used for the title of the map and the legend. The Streets layer would be used to draw the streets of Somerville.
I would then define the colours for each of the items represented on the map in the legend, as defined here:
For the map drawing, I would start off by drawing the river course, since the town of Somerville is oriented around the river. Therefore, by drawing the river course first, I have an idea of where all of the town's suburbs are going to be located.
Once that's done, oh yes - the serious work on the map would now start - as I would then move on to drawing the main routes in and out of the town centre, as well as the streets in the neighbourhoods.
One thing that I've noticed when drawing residential streets in Inkscape is that the start of the drawing overlaps the main roads due to the use of different colours. This means that if we leave it as it is, we are not going to get a very good map output in the final version.
I fix this issue by selecting the "Lower to Bottom" option to bring the residential street behind the main road. This means that we now get a proper connection as shown here:
On the first day of the project, I managed to get round to drawing the northern and eastern neighbourhoods of Somerville, including the Linwood, Frankston, Northlea and "Grid Town" districts:
On the second day, I got around to finishing most of the southern neighbourhoods, including the area immediately to the south of the old town. I also changed the river navigation slightly as the peninsula around the riverbank to the southwest was a bit too wide and would have caused problems with scaling when trying to draw streets around that area.
On the third day of the project, I started making some drawings of the main roads around the area of the Westlea neighbourhood.
By the time I got to the fourth day, I made my way round to drawing the Westlea, Chantry, Burgess Vale and West Oldham neighbourhoods - taking over 10 hours due to the large number of streets that I had to draw in that area.
The fifth day of the project was the most intense, as I had spent over 12 hours drawing a very large area around the north-west, including the motorway that bypasses Somerville. At one point, I ended up having to change the design of Somerville from the original drawing due to the lack of space, by letting the main road separating Norton Park and Stanmore curve at a more steeper angle compared to the original drawing - which also meant having to alter the design of the surrounding streets so that it aligns with the steeper angle.
Day 5 also marked the point where I started to do some work on the old town, as I managed to draw a small area near the middle that would make up the main square - can you see the little stub in the middle?
On the sixth day of the project, I began to draw the complicated maze of streets around the old town, starting off with the passageways and green spaces around the river bank. This is because the riverside path only involves having to draw one line and is therefore the easiest part of the old town to draw.
As the old town contains lots of narrow pedestrian-only alleyways, I've decided to use a narrower stroke width of 0.365mm to draw the alleyways in town compared to the usual 0.965mm used to draw streets that are suitable for cars, as shown in this diagram below:
By the end of the sixth day, I managed to finish around three quarters of the old town - but it just goes to show how complex the old town can be in terms of drawing it.
And after spending a couple more hours finishing up the old town on the seventh day, it sounds like the map is done in terms of drawing the lines.
But, wait a minute - I began to realise that on the hand-drawing of Somerville, I had a railway line as well as a train station in the area of the Grid Town, so let's not forget about that, buddy!
To finish off the core map, I then touched up the green spaces and parks that make up Somerville Town. Here, I decided to do things a bit differently to what I did for the hand-drawn map, by deciding to only illustrate the green spaces that are located inside the town limits, rather than the countryside that is located outside of the town's limits.
And after adding all the suburb names to the map, and retouching some of the streets to have a more smooth curvature, here it is - the finished version of Somerville Town!
Conclusions from the Somerville map projectI have to say that I really enjoyed working on the Somerville project - although getting a map finished takes a lot of time, there was a very relaxing aura to drawing the map and so it was well worth the amount of hours that I put in. For me, drawing minimalist style, modern city maps has to be one of the most fascinating fantasy map styles, as they offer a much different feel to traditional Dungeons and Dragons style maps in that you can simulate real-life cities and towns. I wish that more map authors would use their blogs to showcase modern-style fantasy maps.
On the other hand, I also think that I could have done the Somerville project a little bit differently - as I was doing the digital drawing on an A4-sized canvas, and I did the hand-drawing of Somerville on an A4 sheet of paper, I could have scanned the original piece of paper and used that as an overlay when drawing the maps digitally - that way, I wouldn't have had to guess where to draw all the streets. But at the end of the day, to keep my sanity, making progress rather than being perfect at everything is the way to go with map drawings!
I also decided to use the Somerville map to show it to other people as a way of gauging interest and sympathy when doing primary market research on the fantasy map business idea (such as the example of me showing off the map of Somerville to the Enterprise Manager at the University of Suffolk Bootcamp event). I must say that all of the people that I showed the map to were really impressed by the amount of effort that I had put in to making the map - however I was given some really good feedback for improving my work by some of the market research participants in that I could illustrate the football stadium, as well as some of the old structures in the old town area.
With that, I hope you have enjoyed going through the process of making a modern city map, and I am looking forward to sharing with you the final version of the Youtubia landmass that I made digitally on this blog. Keep an eye out on this space!
All the best,
Jakub
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