Azuline Falls: The Shelves of Arlath

This map was the winning entry for the August 2014 monthly challenge over at cartographersguild.com

The challenge: take an existing image or photograph and then map that location, including all the areas around that cannot be seen in the image itself. Thus, you are to imagine and create the parts of the location that are "around the bend" from what you can see in the original image.

I chose a photo of an interesting double waterfall with a footbridge in between, somewhere in a mountainous and forested setting. I kept myself in the dark as to where the location was, and created everything you see here based solely on the photograph itself (I have since learned where it is, and now I'd like to go there!). I did some bootstrapping measurements and back-of-the-envelope calculations to set the dimensions, created an overhead layout in Adobe Illustrator, then drew just about everything you see by hand, digitally in ProCreate on the iPad. I use an Adonit Jot Touch stylus. The final step was to bring the map into Photoshop for the application of labels and text elements.