The British and Irish Isles Completion

After over 1000 hours of drawing and 1.5 years, The British and Irish Isles is finally complete. The initial concept for the map started back in early September of 2023, with drawing starting later that same year in November.  Fast forward a full year, and on November 4^th, 2024, I put the pencil down. 

I’ve been very interested in geography for a long time. Back in 2022 I drew this map for my girlfriend (now fiancé) as an anniversary gift.  Her family is from San Marino.  The level of detail added to this one was much lower.

 

Why the UK and Ireland? With their jagged coasts, islands, mountains, castles, skyscrapers, viaducts and expansive cities, I believed this would be a great region of the world to flesh out in a higher detail than you would find on a typical map.

This being my first large scale art project, the learning curve was steep.  To go from having near zero experience to putting pencil on paper took many hours of practice. Before starting the project I spent time drawing individual buildings, and then full cities to get an idea of the detail and size I would need to be working with.

 

 

I used a projector to put a picture I stitched together with images from Google Earth onto the paper.  Using it to trace the coastlines in a low level of detail, I then went back afterwards to make improvements now that the positioning is correct.

After having the outline of the countries done and being satisfied with how my practice with buildings was coming along, I started out on the map for the first time, beginning with London.  This formed the base for every other city on the map, trying to keep the relative height of all buildings as close as possible to their real world heights, using the height of the Shard as reference.  I tried to base the sprawl of the city on its population, but in a lot of cases its historical significance also came into play.

London after the first drawing session

Progress was very slow at the beginning, usually only drawing 1 city per session.  I quickly improved however, and was able to increase the rate and level of detail I could draw at.  This proved to be somewhat of an issue as after a few months of drawing there was a noticeable difference in quality between the first cities I drew and the ones I was drawing at this point. This led me to completely redraw every single city that I had already drawn on the map, wiping out a couple of months’ worth of progress.

 All the cities in this image ended up being re-drawn

London after re-drawing

I didn't start the coloring process until all the drawing was complete, which ended up being a smart idea.   By the end I had gone back numerous times and updated or changed things that I thought needed to be improved.

In its finished form, this map contains over 280 cities, as well as a countless number of castles, ruins, and other buildings scattered over the map.  All 21 National Parks are labeled, 12 different languages are present: English, Guernésiais, Jèrriais, French, Auregnais, Serquiais, Cornish, Manx, Irish Gaelic, Welsh, Scots, and Scottish Gaelic, and all major bodies of water are labeled. 

In the future, I plan on continuing to draw countries, states, continents and other regions of the world in a similar level of detail.