Dosdedos Metropolitan Area
I used to draw some doodles and maps, but for a long time as
I'm getting older I lose my creativity and patience to hand
drawn stuff but this one from 2013 is still my absolute
favourite fictional map I've ever made! Fun Fuct: 'Dos Dedos'
means "Two Fingers" in Spanish as the whole area gets its name
from these two westernmost peninsulas which on the map look
very much like the index finger and the thumb making measuring
gesture :D.
Created: 16th February -
Dosdedos State concept and doodles
When I had a plan for a metropolitan area with interesting coastline and attractive terrain that was particularly good I tried to make the entire country adjacent to it. I've never finished a single one, but at least the map of the metro area itself was finished. But that archipelago with the shape inspired by Portugal is nice indeed. Oh and I see what song I listened back then: 'Gemini - Robots', good times.
Created:
Dosdedos unfinished first attempts
Sometimmes it took me two or more attempts to make a metro area with the certain features. That try hadn't been finished, I don't see why but maybe that's better because the successful map has been drawn on gridless paper so it looks less like a school doodle.
Created:
Hello Peninsula (and unfinished large city on the eastside)
As you can see I hardly ever fill the entire pages and it
hinders a great potential for cool looking maps. However, I cringe a little about those tiny islands scathered near the east coast of the peninsula, as they look so unrealistic and were inspired by the hype around artificial islands of Dubai, which I was guilty of falling into it.
Created:
Fictional urban area divided by three borders
Continiuous urban areas divided by important borders like Berlin (back in the days), Nicosia, Detroit - Windsor, El Paso - Ciudad Juarez or Hong Kong - Shenzhen are kinda fascinating as how the practical solutions to infrastructure and transport have to overcome different political regimes. The layout of the city was partially inspired by my hometown of Zamość, Poland.
Created: no date
Mirisla Island
That's a tiny map that I've drawn days before I went to a trip to Croatia. Maps of Dalmatia with its many islands and villages was an inspiration.
Created:
The Independent City of Pala Tomaco
I also like to draw some tiny city-states, although I
usually don't finish them either. That city is an
independent island country that is almost bordering the
larger state up north, just like Singapore and Malaysia that was my
inspiration at that time.
Created:
The Autonomous City of Luara Mante
The metropolis of about 5 million citizens placed on an island that is a mixture of miniaturized Cyprus and Xiamen in Fujian, China
Created:
Laure Isle
I like the name Laura and named some places in my imaginary maps. This island was inspired by densely packed island of Male, the capital of Maldives that got full storm protection walls around the island from Japanese.
Created:
Unnamed Island Nation 1
This tiny island was created during my fascination of small British dependencies, like Isle of Man, Jersey, Bermuda and so on. I can recall that the shape of the island is very much inspired by Moldova, as I was fascinated by that country by that times simply because it's very close to Poland (but without common border except like 400 years ago) and barely anyone tought anything about that country in school. I guess the second smaller island is Chad shaped tho.
Created:
Unnamed Island Nation 2
And this one is slightly smaller. The map also includes some topographic contours as the island is much more hilly than the previous one.
Created:
Kingdom of Mazurias Islands
Creating some tiny fictional states was my hobby for a long
time, with additional flags and statistics. That is a
fictional archipelago formerly colonized by Poland.
Created: 8th January -
Unnamed Island Nation 3
Yet another unnamed city on the island, this time nested between two small mountain ranges. The city seems to be unusually large and artificially planned. I really like that coastline and the idea for an island micronation is pretty neat, why I didn't finished it I don't know. But maybe that blank space is an oportunity to revive this map, I have some plans to finished that map with the more digital and even interactive spin.
Created: no date
Unnamed Coastal City
I really regret that I hadn't finished that map, so for the sake of visibility I added with GIMP water bodies gradient and marked the border with the purple line as it supposed to be city-state or at least autonomous city. Batumi in Georgia (country) and the region of Adjaria was the inspiration.
Created:
Sandgate Region and Vanbaren Micronation
Another example of my fascination about small states, this time the inspiration was San Marino, which is a tiny independent republic near the coast but not touching it and is next to a city that is much more populated than the state itself, in case of San Marino it's Rimini, in case of Vanbaren, the city of Sandgate.
Created:
The State of Tomhein
This state was inspired by an almost city-state of Bahrain
with suspiciously similar flag an the name.
Created:
Tomua Lake County
Whether am I an egomaniac or just plainly not that creative, I just couldn't help
but name some prominent fictional places by some distorted version of my real name.
Here's the map of county inspired by all those squarish US counties with endless grids
of mile by mile fields.
Created:
Fake Adelaide-New York Duopolis
Once upon a time I was roaming around Australian cities on the map and I came across Adelaide and I've liked the topography of that city, so I've designed my interpretation of that city and added my takeoff of Manhattan and parts of Long Island on the east. Some elements of the eastern part of the duopolis were inspired by Melbourne, as it was also meant as my silly "fanfiction" of what would happen if Adelaide and Melbourne were that close to each other, the New York part went just natural as I know its basic topography much better than Melbourne.
Created:
Tiny fake Dubrovnik
That's my later attempt to create compact dense old city inspired by Dubrovnik, but really it more of a modern city with medieval fortress next to the bay. On the right top corner there is a larger scale outline of the city with visible railway that supposed to stop on the western seaport. As always, no descriptions on the map, scale probably 1cm - 100m.
Created: no date
Walled city with lake
Fortified and isolated cities made me think about how to put everything the citizens need in a compact area and how many entrances are needed. I guess it's my only map where I explicitly marked an aqueduct (that's the line on the west with arrows).
Created: no date
Unnamed city on peninsula
One of my many standard 1cm - 2km scale agglomeration map with no descriptions. The only thing I can say that the city is supposed to hold over one milion people, and 1.2 million in the metro area. I guess it was inspired by either Beirut, Dakar or prehaps Cape Town (at least location on a large peninsula heading west).
Created:
Bird like island city
That's a nice shaped island, I was wondering around Openstreetmap and found Norfolk-Virginia Beach area with residential cul-de-sacs on peninsulas and thought that it must be nice to live on such area.
Created: no date
Paris/Rome like city
Paris is its own category when it comes to urban planning. I'm still impressed of the shape and scale of Boulevard Périphérique - central Paris ring road. This woefully unfinished city map depicts the mixture of Paris and Rome. Large port on south-western corner and more than a 7 hills (hardly visible triangles) indicate similarity to Rome, and mentioned ring road and the flow of the central river looks similar to the map of Paris.
Created:
Fictional country based on Andalusia and southern Portugal
For a long time my favourite book ever was a thick world atlas with detailed maps of almost all the countries of the world (only Papua New Guinea was unfortunately cut from detailed maps of Oceania for some reason). The 1 cm = 30 km scale was used often for European maps and Andalusia part with Cadiz and Malaga was just a nice region to imitate.
Created:
Tomaz Minoria and Eruazia countries
The inspiration of that map should be very clear for all map enthusiast out there: The Balkans. Just check out all the names of those countries, in four different scripts, including undeciferable name at the southermost state. The map was heavily color graded and cropped, the entire sheet of paper have a lot of blank countries but I added them at the top right corner.
Created: no date
Two combined maps with fake Eiffel Tower
I combined my two small incomplete maps into one larger compiled map, also incomplete, because I'm lazy. One was the large central and old city district with a giant park and X shaped building which supposed to be a replica of the Eiffel Tower and the second map was just a park with the stadium, now it's on the southwestern edge of the map. I made that compilation of those two unrelated places because I kinda like those maps, but when separate, they are too tiny and not publishing worthy. You can see where each map begins just by looking at the paper grids, I did not try my best here, but I see how much potential all those tiny maps have with robust digital tools.
Created: both maps had no date, Compiled:
Alternative History of Zamość Fee Tail
Apart from creating completely new lands and cities I used to be an avid fan of ahistorical maps, so I made a few too. Some of them are way to cringe to ever show them off in the current geopolitical situation (you know, the political views and outlook of a teenager is not that sophisticated), but this one ages quite gracefully.
Zamość Fee Tail was a land owned by Jan Zamoyski, a powerful aristocrat that found the city of Zamość in the XVI century. The land was eventually fully nationalized after the World War II by the Polish People's Republic but in my fictional version of the history, the fee tail still exists as a autonomous part of Poland.
In years 1975-1999 Poland used to be divided by 49 voivodeships, instead of todays 16. After the reform in 1998 many provincional cities, including Zamość, lost most of its voivodeship offices which is still viewed by some people as the degradation of Polish province. This alternative history map colsely resembles the former Zamość Voivodeship and expands it with Lubaczów Poviat, which is connected with Zamość by common Roman Catholic Zamość-Lubaczów Diocese, and the western areas that used to be part of Zamoyski Fee Tail, but it's ironically signed on the map as "area owned in XVII century, occupied by Poland".
Project of a Multimodal Transport Hub with diamond interchange
I was kinda intrigued when I heard about diamond interchanges for the first time, never seen such a solution in any map in Poland, so I sketched some transport hub next to a highway to visualize for myself how it works. This transport hub also includes terminus train station (on the right) and bus station with multiple parking spots.
Klemensow Tech Park project
When I get a hand on the basic workflow in Inkscape, I wanted to try to imitate some infrastructural projects on real satellite images, in this attempt, I've designed a completely made-up technology campus in an empty lot of land next to a demolished sugar factory in Lublin voivodeship in Poland. The long building marked with red line on the left and the railroad tracks are the only still existing structures in that area. Right after I uploaded that map on this site I've noticed that I missed a very important 'no left turn' sign on next to the eastern exit from the parking, even though I spent a lot of time designing all those white lanes and signs so the whole parking lot make sense.
Polish-Chinese University of Tomorrow (PoChUJ) Campus in Warsaw
During the somewhat enforced covid rules of September 2020 I was wondering how could it look like if I have been living in foreign country on university campus. As I had plenty of time on my computer I started to writing some short horror/cringy series of stories about life inside tightly sealed from the outside world, large campus of the fictional Polish-Chinese University of Tomorrow.
The premise of the series is a isolated life of a large group of men from various East European and Asian countries, and a very few women as the university educates mostly highly technical fields of studies and most of them immidiately run away as fast as the rector's office ruled the total lockdown. People inside the campus can roam free but under no circumstances can't get out. All those guys react differently but the main plot is focused on student government officials (students only) as now they hold total control over affairs within the area where instructors only teach remotely. The stories are just a bunch of drafts and not publish-worthy, but I like the idea of the university and the campus like that. It was supposed to be symbolic in a bunch of ways. Each building of the compound is marked by a letter and one of Chinese city that starts with it. The campus is still brand new but unfinished and aestetically harsh that somewhat corresponds to the surrounding newly rich area. The campus is located on an actual empty lot (not for long) in rapidly urbanising and expensive district of Warsaw - Wilanów. The alias of the university is an explicit joke easily understood in Polish.
Created:
Tomanocoste and Lankarta Region
Most of the time I don't want to clutter the map with random place names but in this case, on the map of the peninsula surrounded from three sides by water, I could place city names whefe they don't cover anything important. That map is the first project when I came up with the word "Lankarta" which is made of two words: 'Lan' which means just 'Local Area Network', and 'Karta' which means 'Map' in many indo-european languages. As you may notice, the shape of the peninsula and the placement of major cities is very similar to the southernmost large peninsula on Tomanocoste Megacity map shown below.
Created:
Tomanocoste Megacity
My maps were heavily inspired by a few large scale, sprial bounded roadmaps, most notably by Poland Map scaled 1cm - 3km and lately by France and Great Britain roadmaps both scaled 1cm - 2km, which became my most favourite scale in which I make and read paper maps. This map of mine was both the largest map by covered area in 1cm - 2km scale and the largest, yet sadly unfinished, map by the physical size of the canvas, as it was originally drawn in two A3 sheets taped together. The scan is cut out of the top as it was only a large section of completely empty area further north of the unfinished multi-runway airport. The megacity was expected to be inhabited by almost 20 million people.
Created: March -
The Country of Mangaria (hand-drawn)
If you take a look a bit closely into this map you may find out that the megacity of Tomanocoste from the previous map is right on the southwest coast of Mangaria, which is yet another fictional country that I've made and obviously not finished.
Created:
Physical Map of Mangaria and the surrounding areas (digitalized)
That map is one of my first attempts to digitalized my hand-drawn maps. As you can see, my methods were fairly primitive, that was the time when I didn't even know Inkscape existed. Also the layout of mountain ranges were much altered in digital version for a reason that I don't remember, probably to make north and south more unified.
Created:
Mangarka Continent with detailed region of Tomanocoste
From the map of surrounding areas of Tomanocoste, to the entire continent with various countries, height map, even ocean currents, there is a serious worldbuilding going on that map. I don't know why the country where Tomanocoste is located is misspelled as 'Mangarka', I guess I'll just name the entire continent by that, why not. That the map with in which have the most names out of all the maps of Tomanocoste series, now you can see how other places and cities were supposed to be called. Oh and I love how that mountainous (red colored) archipelago is named 'Weirda'.
Created: