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Description
I rarely make maps of fantasy places or at a scale small enough that the map reader can make out individual buildings. So, when I was approached with a commission to design a map of a city and its surrounding areas, I was excited to create something a little different!

The clubsite for the world this map is set in can be found at the following address: www.warlderia.yolasite.com/
. I found the world interesting and deep in lore, giving me a lot to work with when designing this map.

My favourite thing about my map of Northern Ireland were the gentle colours of the landscape and the sea. I loved how the colours were vibrant enough to draw the eye but natural enough to seem realistic. I wanted to replicate this for this map. However, since this is a map of a fictional place, a town from an imagined fantasy world, I would not be able to just download real life topographic data and bathymetry from the internet that matched the area well. So, I was forced to come up with my own relief and bathymetry.

To make the relief and bathymetry as realistic as possible, I drew real-life data, downloading EMODnet bathymetry data of the coast of Scotland and EU-DEM data of Ireland, rendering the data with pleasant colours scheme in QGIS. Then, in Photoshop, I used the Content Aware tool to ‘fill in’ areas that were blank (such as land in the bathymetry dataset, and sea in the digital elevation model).

Datasets used
EMODnet Bathymetry Consortium, ‘EMODnet Digital Terrain Model’, EMODnet Digital Bathymetry (2018) <doi.org/10.12770/18ff0d48-b203… [accessed 11 January 2021]
European Environmental Agency, ‘EU-DEM v1.1’, Copernicus Land Monitoring Service (2016) <land.copernicus.eu/pan-europea… [accessed 11 January 2021]

Description
I rarely make maps of fantasy places or at a scale small enough that the map reader can make out individual buildings. So, when I was approached with a commission to design a map of a city and its surrounding areas, I was excited to create something a little different!

The clubsite for the world this map is set in can be found at the following address: www.warlderia.yolasite.com/
. I found the world interesting and deep in lore, giving me a lot to work with when designing this map.

My favourite thing about my map of Northern Ireland were the gentle colours of the landscape and the sea. I loved how the colours were vibrant enough to draw the eye but natural enough to seem realistic. I wanted to replicate this for this map. However, since this is a map of a fictional place, a town from an imagined fantasy world, I would not be able to just download real life topographic data and bathymetry from the internet that matched the area well. So, I was forced to come up with my own relief and bathymetry.

To make the relief and bathymetry as realistic as possible, I drew real-life data, downloading EMODnet bathymetry data of the coast of Scotland and EU-DEM data of Ireland, rendering the data with pleasant colours scheme in QGIS. Then, in Photoshop, I used the Content Aware tool to ‘fill in’ areas that were blank (such as land in the bathymetry dataset, and sea in the digital elevation model).

Datasets used
EMODnet Bathymetry Consortium, ‘EMODnet Digital Terrain Model’, EMODnet Digital Bathymetry (2018) <doi.org/10.12770/18ff0d48-b203… [accessed 11 January 2021]
European Environmental Agency, ‘EU-DEM v1.1’, Copernicus Land Monitoring Service (2016) <land.copernicus.eu/pan-europea… [accessed 11 January 2021]