The Art of Map Making

When researching into world making for fantasy stories I came across a fascinating suggestion from someone online. They said that the best way to make a map was to take your camera out into nature and take close up pictures of tree bark, side walk stains, and various other objects. Then you take a piece of paper and trace your map from the picture that you had taken. The reasoning for this is that if you try to freehand a map (unless you are a talented artist) that you are likely to create something that looks really wrong.

So taking this into heart, my friend Stephanie and I went out on the town several years ago and walked around parks in the Kirkland, WA area to see what we could find. To our amazement the things we identified as making the best pictures for maps was....wait for it.....bird poop!!!! Ta-da!

You may think I'm nuts, but it works. We took two different pictures from our collection of bird poop and sidewalk stains and merged them together. When I tried to print it out on my computer it turned out I only had colored construction paper. So our map for the Nedaran Prophecy remained, for years, a collection of three pieces of various types of paper, stapled together to create one consistent map.

Well, this morning I finally broke down and traced over the colored map as best as I could in order to transfer it onto a white piece of paper. Its not as beautiful as being able to use the dots and pixels from the patterns of poop to show where the forests and mountain ranges are, but you still get the general idea. So for the fun of it, I now show to your the map for the Nedaran Prophecy series (as it currently stands). So my writing tip for everyone this month is to take your camera, and go out to explore nature. See what kind of map you can create from what you find. Who knows, maybe it will just work out for your story. Good Luck!