This Germany map illustration is one of my assignment for “Folio Focus Summer 2018” course. I recently started this 10 week intensive portfolio preparation course as I really want to expand my portfolio in the art licensing type of market. This includes pattern and surface designs, greeting cards, etc. I have never taken this class before so I had no clue what’s in this class and the reason I wanted to take this class is I saw other illustrators that I know take the course and they produced some really beautiful works as a result.

As always my business has been a little quieter this summer (well, at least for 1 month), so I decided to use this “break” to work really hard to expand my portfolio and to also give my website a new look. If you’ve followed my work for a while, you should notice the different “look” of my website. I changed the logo, much of the layout and basically just smartened it up.

But back to my assignment. My assignment for this week is called “Wanderlust”. We can create a park or picnic theme or we can create a “map!”, so I thought ah-ha(!), this is what I do. I created a base map of Germany a while ago and this gave me an excuse to finally complete it. This last year has been so crazy busy with work for myself I’ve literally had no time to work on any personal projects, so I decided this is a great opportunity to finally complete this map and so something for myself.

Many of my maps have taken a few weeks to create but for this assignment we only had one week (we get a brand new brief every Monday and the deadline is Sunday), so this time I changed my strategy for illustrating this map. Normally I will spend a few days or even a couple weeks researching then I’ll spend a week or so doing all the elements sketches. But as I didn’t have time for this map, I just straight used Google search, wikipedia, tripadvisor and lonely planet, these kind of websites to do research. Luckily Germany government sat up a lot of “Visit Berlin“, “Visit Saarland“…etc this kind of website, so finding out specialities for local areas within Germany was a lot easier than normal.

Also, I’ve now been working with Snapchat for almost a year, so creating attractions, buildings, these kind of illustrations has become almost second nature. I can create these elements super quick, so I was able to complete this map in just 1 week! I wouldn’t say this was an easy task, I was pretty exhausted (creative wise) once it was finished but I love how it looks and want to do more maps!

Another thing that’s a bit different with this map compared to previous ones, I illustrated more little characters doing different things on the map. I think they make my map look more fun, cute and happy! I still drew a lot of food for this map as local food tasting is still one of my favourite things to do when I travel. Another slight surprise is why no-one ever told me Germany has so much delicious food. A lot of the food in Germany looks absolutely delicious. I visited Germany almost 20 years ago and I remember one placed we visited was Heidelberg, which I absolutely loved. It was beautiful, the food was delicious and I love chocolate from Germany. I really want to go back to eat more food but to also see more of the country and meet more of the very nice and friendly people I met there.

I hope you like my map of Germany! If you want to buy a print of this map please visit my Etsy shop.