Hand-made city maps

[Renno]

Hey cartographers! Many years ago, I posted some of my early hand-drawn maps. Meanwhile I've been drawing many more, I hope you like them. I tend to use the Dutch town model, because its one of the most special, with each decade another fashion and never full market influence (which would create this urban sprawl). I have many more on my Flickr-account, often in too high resolution to upload them in here, so: maps - a set on Flickr

[Domino44]

those look really nice! I always like good hand done maps!

[Cunning Cartographer]

I have mixed feelings. On the one hand they look good, on the other hand I don't personally like the style/shortcut of using the roads to cut through blocks of colour to make the buildings, as every building conforms to the exact shape of roads (which never happens). It's a quicker method, sure, (though it's obvious you spent a lot of time on these) but it just makes them look a little less authentic for my liking.

[Renno]

I understand what you mean, except that it seems that you think that every street block is one building block. One little square can be up to 100 different buildings, before generalisation is so much, that I have to start drawing each building seperately. Of course, buildings lines may we broken by 10 metres without appearing so on these maps. These two cities are about 3.5×2.5 kilometres, drawn on a sheet of ca. 35×25 centimetres, so my it's actually very detailed.

I have mixed feelings. On the one hand they look good, on the other hand I don't personally like the style/shortcut of using the roads to cut through blocks of colour to make the buildings, as every building conforms to the exact shape of roads (which never happens). It's a quicker method, sure, (though it's obvious you spent a lot of time on these) but it just makes them look a little less authentic for my liking.

Hmm where's my previous reply? Well, I see what you mean, but did you understand that each street block might contain up to 100 seperate buildings? Both maps are appr. 3.5×2.5 kilometres, on a paper sheet of 35×27 cm, so it's no way of drawing each building seperately :p

[Korash]

What happened was that your first post was caught up in moderation, something that happens sometimes to new members. I merged the two, so that is why it looks a bit duplicated, but shows that the post was not lost...just hiding. It generally takes five posts to be rid of that...

[Cunning Cartographer]

Oh I totally get the scale of it and that these are blocks as opposed to individual buildings. I think I was thinking more realistically that the blocks wouldn't conform exactly to the same shape of the roads, but I guess from a Googlemaps style map they do conform a little bit more. I think the reason that it stood out to me so much was that it lacks any side streets, or dead ends that cut into the middle of a building etc, and instead is just a perfect intersection of colour being divided by the roads.