Perth

[ChickPea]

I almost wasn't going to post this map, as it honestly feels like a bit of a cheat compared to the stunning hand-drawn maps that have been posted recently, but... I like how it turned out, so why not...

This is a map of the city of Perth in Scotland (not to be confused with its Australian namesake!) It's a place I'm fond of, so decided to have a go at mapping it. I gathered the data from OpenStreetMap in QGIS & exported it into Inkscape where I did everything else. Added a parchment background to give it more of a Ye Olde Mappe feel. The bridge illustration came from me running Inkscape's Trace Bitmap feature on a photo I took a while back. I'm pleased with the final result as I don't do that many city maps, so thank you to OpenStreetMap for doing the heavy lifting for me!

Perth.jpg

[Brendo]

I loved the work, especially when I realized from your description that it was a real city! It's twice as hard to make beautiful maps of places that already exist, and you did it very well!

[MikesMaps]

That's a fine map, and one I could see being on tourist info display boards on the street there. Are you posting it locally to see what reaction it gets? I'll have a look at OpenStreetMap as sounds like an interesting tool for real places.

[Simkin]

As already said, the map is really good. Congrats

[ThomasR]

Your constant shift towards pink sends a dreamy vibe to this already beautiful map !

[Ilanthar]

Excellent! Your color palette works very well and the whole map is very clean and pleasing to the eye.

[Valterink]

Would love to see a "speedpaint" video of this work! Didn't know this could be done using QGIS! I use it for my day job (environmental legislation stuff), your map is really interesting!

[ChickPea]

I loved the work, especially when I realized from your description that it was a real city! It's twice as hard to make beautiful maps of places that already exist, and you did it very well!

As already said, the map is really good. Congrats

Your constant shift towards pink sends a dreamy vibe to this already beautiful map !

Excellent! Your color palette works very well and the whole map is very clean and pleasing to the eye.

Thanks so much for the kind words! Really appreciate it.

Would love to see a "speedpaint" video of this work! Didn't know this could be done using QGIS! I use it for my day job (environmental legislation stuff), your map is really interesting!

Haha a speedpaint video would consist of me going back and forth trying six different shades of a colour then going back to my first choice!

Most of the work here was done in Inkscape rather than QGIS. I used the QuickOSM plugin to get the buildings, streets, parks & river shapes from OpenStreetMap, then I exported everything in SVG via the Print Layout Manager. I opened the SVG in Inkscape and did some clean up (QGIS always exports multiple empty groups for some reason, and this annoys me cos I like to keep my layers & objects tidy). After that it was just a matter of making it pretty in Inkscape, which is a whole other topic! If you're familiar with QGIS you should be able to gather the basic data pretty easily. You don't have to use Inkscape either since you can export in various other formats to use in any image editor/paint program. You should give it a bash with something fairly simple to see how it goes. I really enjoy messing around with real world places just to experiment.

That's a fine map, and one I could see being on tourist info display boards on the street there. Are you posting it locally to see what reaction it gets? I'll have a look at OpenStreetMap as sounds like an interesting tool for real places.

Thanks, I'm happy you like it! I've only shared it here & on Mastodon, not sure where Perth people hang out online! Definitely check out OSM if you're doing somewhere real world. It saves so much time!

[MikesMaps]

Thanks so much for the kind words! Really appreciate it.




Haha a speedpaint video would consist of me going back and forth trying six different shades of a colour then going back to my first choice!

Most of the work here was done in Inkscape rather than QGIS. I used the QuickOSM plugin to get the buildings, streets, parks & river shapes from OpenStreetMap, then I exported everything in SVG via the Print Layout Manager. I opened the SVG in Inkscape and did some clean up (QGIS always exports multiple empty groups for some reason, and this annoys me cos I like to keep my layers & objects tidy). After that it was just a matter of making it pretty in Inkscape, which is a whole other topic! If you're familiar with QGIS you should be able to gather the basic data pretty easily. You don't have to use Inkscape either since you can export in various other formats to use in any image editor/paint program. You should give it a bash with something fairly simple to see how it goes. I really enjoy messing around with real world places just to experiment.




Thanks, I'm happy you like it! I've only shared it here & on Mastodon, not sure where Perth people hang out online! Definitely check out OSM if you're doing somewhere real world. It saves so much time!

Thanks for the OSM/QGIS info. I'll definitely check it out as I intend to do some real world maps sometime. Is there a Perth Reddit you could post it on?

[- JO -]

Great work! The process is interesting, I should try it!