United States of America Map illustration. Over the last couple of months I’ve been working on my latest map illustration which is an illustrated map of the United States of America. As you will know there are so many states in the USA so it took me quite a long time to do all the research and sketches for each element that you can see on the map.

At first I was going down the traditional route of searching for typical tourist attractions in the USA. But after I discovered a very fun, cool and pretty awesome website called “Roadside America” I decided to change the whole direction of my research. This website shows a lot of “unusual places or landmarks” for each of the different states of America. So I found a lot of really cool landmarks and attractions from this website including the giant pink pig Floyd, Big blue whales, watermelon water tower, giant molar, giant coffee pot building and milk bottle building…

I have never been to the United States of America and I’m really desperate to visit there one day and even take a road trip with my family. Apart from some of the famous and traditional tourist attractions I really want to see the fascinating quirky and fun attractions. How cool is it to see a building in the shape of a giant basket or coffee pot?’ That’s how I thought during the process of creating this map illustration.

I also included some agriculture, architecture and of course I can’t miss my favourite thing in the world; ‘Food!’. One of my favourite things to do when I travel is taste the local food. I’m not talking about typical hotel food, I’m talking about real local food so I also illustrated a lot of food that each state is famous for. For example, Florida is famous for it’s key lime pie, Michigan is famous for it’s cherries and cherry pie and huckleberry pie comes from Idaho. I remember when I watched American films and lots of films always talk about “pie” and they sound really delicious. This is something I definitely have to try when I finally visit America and maybe I can also illustrate an American pie map.

My computer is a little bit old now so it’s starting to struggle a little when working on this kind of project. With the USA having 50 states I wanted to choose at least 1 or 2 things to illustrate to represent each state. So that’s at least 100 illustrations and all with a lot of detail, so you can imagine my computer and I had many words (me shouting and my computer beach balling). Below are some key elements illustrations I illusted for this United States of America Map illustration.

I hope you like my map illustration of the United States of America and perhaps you will want to travel to the USA to see these fun and cool attractions just as much as I want to.

America map illustration

Every time I illustrate a map of a country it always teaches me so much about that place before I visit. For example, now I know there is a fruit called paw paw. Tennessee is the birth place of candy floss and people call people from Alaska “sourdough”. All of those things made this project so much fun.

When I was a little girl I was really into a book (and game) called “Where’s Wally?” and I think this has slightly influenced my map illustration. My maps are very busy with many small details so people like me can have fun trying to find different things. Including all these details also invites the viewer to look at the map for longer so they can find out famous things about their country that they may not have known about before.

Below are some of the detail images from my United States of America Map illustration.

The buildings in the above section of the USA are just so cool. There are buildings that have the shape of a coffee pot, a milk bottle and there’s even a teapot shape building. How aesome. Those buildings look like they should only exist in a Mr Men book but they do actually exist in the real world. There is even a building in Connecticut that is the birthplace of the hamburger but sadly it doesn’t look like a hamburger.

There is also a sweet corn water tower and a giant coffee pot water tower. People are so creative and fun in the USA. I personally just think a water tower is just a water tower. They usually look very boring, grey and they are just a metal tank in the sky and that’s it. But I found so many cute water towers in America through researching the fun and quirky attractions of the USA. So I have illustrated four water towers which are, the sweet corn water tower, giant coffee pot water tower, watermelon water tower and peach water tower. There are so many more water towers I really want to illustrate but I’m afraid if I try to illustrate most or all of them then the map will become the ‘United Water Towers of America’.

This has also been the first time I have had a chance to illustrated different tribes of Indian-American people and also an Eskimo girl. I really enjoyed illustrating these characters and would love to illustrate more in the future. I know these people have played such an important and huge part of American culture so it wasn’t fair and also a shame to not illustrate them in my map illustration.

A must see along the famous “Route 66” is the blue whales slide in a lake in Oklahoma. The sunflower state of Kansas has supposedly the best BBQ ribs in the USA and Kansas is also famous for The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy, sunflowers and of course BBQ ribs. There is also a wagon building in Nebraska.

So that’s it for this map illustration. It was a lot of work but I absolutely love it and have printed it really huge for my home. Working on this project has really enlightened me on what an interesting and awesome country the United States of America and one day I really want to travel around the USA and visit as many of the sites I have illustrated.

If you’re interested in purchasing a print of this image you can buy it here at my Etsy shop: https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/289648655/usa-map-illustration-uk-shipping?ref=pr_shop