Spain Map Illustration. A small update about this map before, this map is only of Spain, neither France or Portugal are featured, note below. I started illustrating this map of Spain right at the end of 2016. I was tying up all my commissions for the year and gave myself a couple weeks to work on personal projects and one of these projects was this map.

I had been intending to work on this map for a few months but with family, work and everything else I had going on it was impossible. Plus these maps need a lot researching, sketching and the elements take time to illustrate.

So after a few late nights I only completed this illustrated map of Spain last month but why did I decide to illustrate another map. Firstly they’re a lot of fun to illustrate and they bring up a lot of good memories, which I’ll go into below. Also a Taiwanese illustration and design magazine called “DPI Magazine” invited me to be one of their featured illustrators for their February issue. The maps I’ve created to date have generated me quite a lot of good business and I wanted to introduce people to maps with my more recent illustration style.

With this motivation I created this map before the magazine’s deadline and I can’t wait to see my illustrations in the latest issue of DPI magazine!

Back to memories, I visited Spain with my husband back in 2010. Back at this time our friend Lorenzo lived in Granada, Spain. Lorenzo is a pretty cool guy, for almost a decade he’s been moving across the globe living and working in different countries whilst learning the language, culture, etc. I met him while working at a popular hotel in Edinburgh and we’ve remained friends since. So we decided to visit him in Spain and we also travelled around Granada and Madrid. For Madrid I really liked the Museo Reina Sofia, the Mercado de San Miguel food market and the Rastro flea market was cool but the city didn’t really blow my socks off.

Granada did blow my socks off though, it had amazing food, stunning weather and the architecture was really beautiful. The Alhambra was really beautiful, we loved all the various cafes, the seafood was great and we of course loved the tapas. I loved that we could go to a bar, pay a couple euros and we’d get a glass of beer with some (mostly) really delicious food. In effect the food was free, how awesome is that. We had a lot of laughs, fun and our bellies were always happy from the food and drink. So I do want to go back to Spain one day and visit the hundreds of other awesome locations and things going on in Spain.

So this map is a combination of memories but a lot of research as well. As with my other maps, this map is focused on food, drink, tourist attractions and some fun things related to Spain. I also illustrated “Pablo Picasso” and “Salvador Dali” on the map as they are two of my favourite Spanish artists.

When I illustrated this map, I felt like I was going down memory lane and I wanted to deliver this happy feeling to people who viewed my map. I hope you want to visit Spain in the future.

Incidentally you can also purchase this map via my Etsy shop here

IMPORTANT NOTE: I’ve received quite a few emails, some quite unpleasant, about Portugal’s representation in this map. This is a map of Spain and only Spain. If you look at the map you’ll see France has been coloured brown but there are features covering France. This is because I want to show off as many things about Spain as possible and there just isn’t enough space available. The same goes for Portugal. I’ve coloured the land brown and covered it with icons but these have nothing to do with Portugal.