Travels and Map-Making

Adventures in the UK, Renoir's beach and secret projects revealed!

I’m writing to you from the UK, where I have been spending most of January. I had missed it and it has been really good to catch up with old friends and revisit favourite places! So far I have been to Bournemouth, Sherborne, Bath, Frome and London, and I’m CREAM CRACKERED but happy.

Fun in Bath with Jordan Amy Lee and Bennie Finn!

I have been on the move quite a bit lately and last month I visited Guernsey. I enjoyed discovering walks along the wild, rocky coastline and clambering up giant hills. My favourite find was a beach on the south of the island called Moulin Huet. Renoir liked it too - he made several paintings there during his 5-week stay in 1883.

Some of Renoir's Guernsey paintings

Pretty bleak at this time of year, but I think winter and big rocks go well together.

I did a lot of peering into rockpools, and this, combined with all the travelling in general, made me think about this project I made when I was at Falmouth Uni:

One of my favourite uni projects!

This must be when my fascination for map-making started. Or maybe it dates back as far as the tea-stained treasure maps I used to make as a child. Either way, they are one of my favourite types of project to work on.

I haven’t really posted about it until now, but illustrating maps has actually been my bread and butter for almost two years. I have been working for a travel company, mapping out all kinds of places from Iceland to Japan. I have kept it a secret because I do this work entirely digitally using vectors, so it feels at odds with the rest of my decidedly analog work.

That said, I really enjoy making them! I just love seeing them come together one element at a time, and the design challenge of placing text and information.

I am eager for more work in this area, so I want to “put myself on the map” as someone who does this kind of thing, but without diluting my public portfolio with different styles.

So, for my first personal project of the year, I decided to take all that I’ve learned so far about map-making and combine it with everything I love about traditional materials, textures and hand-lettering, and make a map of Guernsey!

Here’s the result:

What do you think? I’m pretty pleased with it - I think it looks much more cohesive with the rest of my mixed media work and I had a lot of fun making it. I even used my favourite twig dipped in ink to write the title!

As a bonus, it gave me a chance to bask in the memories of my recent trip and discover new places to visit next time I go. I’ll definitely be making more maps and I will try to record my process as I go along too, if that’s something you would be interested in.

But first I have a few more wintry beach walks to soak in before returning to France!

See you next time,