Islands of Sabolla

[Meton]

A Map of the international borders in the islands of Sabolla before and after the 200 Day War

In the spring of 1704, the kingdom of Arboa decided to attack all its neighbours in the islands of Sabolla, starting a fierce war that lasted exactly 200 days. Many battles were fought at the sea, and a lot of fire and smoke on the water was seen in those days. As a result of the conquest, a new Arboan empire was founded, stretching to all the islands and controlling the sea routes in Sabolla.



This map was finished already in November last year, but somehow I haven't managed to post it here earlier. The map is hand drawn, pen on paper, 17 cm x 27 cm in size (6,7' x 10,6'). Linework is made with Micron pens and colours with Sakura Koi watercolor brush pens. It was a bit difficult to make a proper digital copy of the map, the picture attached is a enhanced scan. I added also an oblique view to capture a bit better how it looks in the original paper.

The idea for this map came from the Mapvember challenge. Although I didn't took part in Mapvember in a daily sense, I did three maps inspired by the prompt list and this was for the day 20, "Smoke on the water". I thought I would try to map something related to a sea war, an in the same time I wanted to try this style for mapping regions where the outlines of each region are coloured in a different colour. This technique was commonly used in maps from roughly the 16th to the 18th century, and to make the map coherent I added all kinds of elements typical in maps from that era. So I ended up drawing a sea monster, some ships, and a compass rose with a ridiculous amount of directions. It was fun to test a completely new style and and the result is not that bad, I think.

There was one more fun detail about this map. The coastline of these islands is not my own design, but taken from a redcurrant that was stuck to the floor
in our apartment and revealed this shape halfway through scrathing it off. The shape of the berry was just so fantastic that I had to use it. A picture of the stain is also attached.

Because I wanted to draw the same islands twice in the finished map, I first transferred the shape of the redcurrant stain and sketched the mountains and borders on a separate piece of paper, and then copied it twice using a light box. For the frame I calculated the lenghts of latitudes and longitudes according to the scale of the map, which is 1:5 000 000. (Unfortunately there is one mistake in the longitude numbers, I accidentaly wrote 25 instead of 20 in one place. From the latitude and longitude numbers you can also see that I located Sabolla to northern Atlantic Ocean).

For a long time I wasn't sure if I should colour just the borders or everything else as well, but I'm happy I decided to colour the cartouche, compass rose and other things too.

I'm happy if you have any comments or thoughts!



(By the way, I have a problem with pictures, if I add the inlines in the text, the picture doesn't show, just the clickable link. Does someone have any idea what is this about?)