Map creator Nate Padavick will teach you how to make a map of your area, your favorite vacation spot, or someplace special to you.
But maps are more than ways to navigate a geographical location. They’re a beautiful art form with their own special ingredients to make them work. They’re a source of endless inspiration. They’re a new way to sketch, draw, watercolor.
Maps are also a great way to tell our stories. It’s not just the location of the town, but the restaurant you ate in, what you ate, who you were with, what you talked about. Maps are a way of preserving memories.
Maps can become like scrapbooks. They’re a place to put details you can’t add to photos—or a way of creating an image of something you don’t have a picture of. They’re a way to organize information and the moments of your life. Maps can do almost anything creative that you want to do.
Here are just some of the different kinds of maps
- A milestone map of your life—where you’ve been, where you’d like it to go
- A souvenir map of your favorite vacation and all the things you saw, did, and ate
- A dream vacation map of the places you haven’t been to yet but want to visit
- Did you move around a lot? Map out all the places you’ve lived, adding notes with your favorite things about each of them
- A book lover’s map of favorite books you’ve read, and that you’d recommend to friends
- Food maps: The best places to eat in town, your Top 5 Favorite Coffee Shops, a map for the office of good places to eat in the area
- A historical map of your town
- An Urban Sketcher’s map of the best places in your area to sketch
- A map of your family tree (an amazing gift; you could make copies and give them out to all your family members)
- Someone in your family getting married? Make a beautiful hand-drawn map of the wedding and reception location (so much better than what the printer can do!)
- A map of things you’d like to do, with a dateline of when you want to accomplish them
- A map of your musical tastes throughout the years
- A map of all the groovy hairstyles you’ve had throughout the years
- A map-guide to things you collect
- A map of your favorite routes to walk or jog, a map of your favorite Yoga poses
- A memory map of your childhood—your favorite places, toys, TV shows, and friends (both real and imaginary)
- A map of where your pet wanders throughout the day
- A map of the evolution of your sketching style
- A map of your garden
- And the locations of all the songbirds and other critters who live there
And this is just the beginning! You’ll be inspired to make all different kinds of maps once you learn how.
