UK Map Illustration. This United Kingdom Map illustration is my 9th map illustration. I completed it just in time to celebrate my 10th year of living in the UK which  quite frankly astounds me. It’s been a great experience living in the UK (of course there have been moments that haven’t been so great and I do miss some things about my home country) but I have so many good memories from living in the UK. If not for moving here, I would never have turned my career around and became an illustrator.

I recently completed a long term illustrator project so I finally have time to create illustrations for my own projects. This map of the United Kingdom is my personal project and I plan to create more maps in the next few months. The last illustrated map I created for was Spain, which you can see here. If you follow my work then you probably know I’m selling my map illustrations on both my website shop, Etsy and other product shops as well.

I personally believe if you want to make a living as an illustrator, it’s not enough to rely just on money from commissions. By selling products and prints on different websites I have on a few occasions saved my financial skin. As you may know a lot of clients don’t like to pay on time and this causes all kinds of problems. As people have said; “never put your eggs in one basket!”. This is why I’m developing more and more products for my shop and some products are selling quite regularly.

Back my UK map illustration, I had a lot of fun creating this map and I think it looks really great. Ever since I started taking Lilla Roger’s MATS (Make Art That Sells) classes I’m using a lot more hand lettering in my illustrations. So this time I put a lot more hand lettering into the UK map illustration and I love how it all looks. I still use some fonts I purchased form They Draw and Cook website of which I highly recommend checking out! If you are interested in purchasing fonts and looking at other resources you can have a look of their shop.

The UK has never been famous for it’s food but there are so many different delicious foods that I had a really hard time deciding which dishes I would put on my map. I feel sad that I wasn’t able to put a “full breakfast” or “Sunday roast” on my map but there wasn’t space. There are also some famous people’s portraits that I really wanted to include, including Williams Shakespeare, Isaac Newton and Jane Austen. This map is fairly general (people, locations and food) but at some point in the future I will create other versions of this map that focus just on locations, food or famous people.

I had a great time creating this map and I’m thinking about creating a map of Germany next. What do you think? I would love to hear your feedback. If you’d like to drop me an email or contact me on social media with suggestions that will be great.