The gallery is a long, undivided "scroll down" type gallery, so I hope it loads fast enough. The maps are sorted just by the explanation that I wrote so enjoy if you like stuff like this!
Dos Dedos 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!
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.
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.
Mirisla Island
That's a tiny map that I've drawn days before I went to a trip to Croatia.
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.
Unnamed island nation map 1
This tiny island was created during my fascination of small British dependencies, like Isle of Man, Jersey, Bermuda and so on.
Unnamed island nation map 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.
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.
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.
City of Oleśnica (fictional)
Well, this map is completely fictional, except the name Oleśnica which is a real town and it's located in western Poland near Wrocław (or Breslau in German). That city plan is not based on the real topography of Oleśnica but it shares the geopolitical context. In alternative history Oleśnica, after World War II was divided between Russian and (East) German occupation zones.
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.
The Town of Telentyn
Yet another city plan of a fictional Polish location, next to fictional (Orda ≠ Odra) river, in this case the names are made-up but sound Polish. Even though the places in that town are in English to make the map look more international and prestigious. I don't recall what the building called "Low" in the center meant to be, I guess it was a court or a law firm (Low ?= Law), I don't know, some silly mistake.
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.
The State of Tomhein
This state was inspired by an almost city-state of Bahrain
with suspiciously similar flag an the name.
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.
Tomiland Artificial Island
That's one of the most embarassing fantasy map I've created. I still cringe about it, but at least it's worth to show as an example of my big childish dreams about some unimainary wealth of having an artificial island full of atractions, but also the topics that were relevant back then in 2008. That was the time when the hype about constuction of artificial islands on UAE shores was the highest, and the environmental, economic and human cost of that unhinged development of Dubai wasn't that highlighted in the media (or at least I wasn't that concern and just read mostly positive news)...
Anyway, my island had to be awesome, it got Great Fun Park, Tomison Company HQ, a ZOO and the army camp with helipad and coastal protected zone, TV Tower, a huge stadium for the population of 35 thousand people, loads of giant hotels, shopping centers next to multireligion temple, my palace, my bank and my fucking statue (sic) next to a my own shipyard lmao
Also that was the time when I heard about the Sealand platform so I put that on the shore for comparision (the original drawing almost faded as was drawn with a weak pencil, so I bolded it in post.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Corasa Island and part of a nearby continent at the north
That map was a first successful attempt of digitalizing the contour map drawn on paper, scanned and vectorized with GIMP.
Corasa Island Road Map with other points of entry
I don't even remember how I drew those roads and lines, I guess I used combination of MS Paint (without layers) and GIMP (with layers which was the main selling point for me). Funny how such a relatively small country have two spaceports lol. Most of the cities didn't have a label but some of them were actually named, but since the map wasn't that useful, those names were used in another, much larger worldbuilding project, which was New Volica, and later on Volican States.
During the time of stay at home covid period, I got hooked into cobuilding a fictional world of Estia within the roleplay of Assembly of Nations. It used to be a leading roleplay of the region of The Leftist Assembly in NationStates.net and hosted on discord. For about a year I've become a leading cartographer of the planet of Estia and that made me to draw a bunch of various maps with Inkscape, learning some basics of QGIS and writing a staggeringly and unnecessarily detailed 130 pages long Factbook about my the most robust worldbuilding project so far, the country of Volican States! I've really enjoyed making maps for that world, however my great desire was to develop a truly interactive and alive world maps but I've never acquired enouugh skills in GIS programs and web technologies to pull this off. The most I could get is to put a static image and wrapping it with leaflet.js and that didn't come without some major annoyances.
Detailed map of Volican States
So far it's my the best looking map (and image in general) made with Inkscape.
Administrative division of Volican States
Volican States was actually meant to be a group of 7 almost completely independent countries that were often hostile to each other. The fragmentation of the land of Volicas was inspired by the real history of Korean Peninsula and the break-up of Yugoslavia. The city of Blisko acted as the capital of all Volican States, even though the status was similar to that of Brussels for European Union, rather than typical federated state capital. The main dividing force of Volica was the conflict between communist Old Volica and capitalist New Volica (yeah it sounds familiar) and the second one was how to pronounce Volica - is the letter 'c' spelled like 'ts' or 'k'?. On Volican Peninsula and nearby, four special administative regions that belonged to foreign countries (my fellow roleplayers Neo Enderion, Enderia, Xelebara and Krat) were also designated as the Volican Peninsula was located in a very strategic "700 km wide strait" between the oceans.
Position of Volican States on the globe
The distances between the mainland Volica and their outlying states are fairly large. That globe was made with QGIS but because the program crashed often when I tried to make the globe with larger resolution, it remained badly pixelated.
Satellite image of Volican States
That satellite image was made before the expansion of Volican States with northern states of Arlavia and Kanalia, before my newer neighbour Ruckya came into play and as well as before my Varla neighbour across the strait made more detailed map with cities. That's why the image is quite empty but I didn't bother to make an updated one. Still, I like that style of the image, poorly executed but kinda charming, made with GIMP.
Because my maps of the real world ain't that good so I don't show them, especially older ones that, unlike my old fictional maps which I still admire, are extremely cringeful and politically stupid. Besides, for me in order to get more interested in creating real maps I would need to gather some original data or be uniquely well designed, but again, I don't have skills nor patience at this moment of my life.
That is a map of my personal opinion about the countries in the world from about 2019. A lot has changed since then, and my opinions became much more nuanced and tamed, to the point that when I tried to fill the new version of that map, I can't help but be conflicted about almost all the countries. The format of this map is just a small sized png template that I colored in MS Paint and posted it on some polish map group.
My yet another opinionated map about the world, but this one is about cultural spheres of the world. The idea was to make an ordered list of countries that are similar to each other that also make a seamless "cultural loop" if that make sense.
That's the map of Europe that I've drawn during some boring lecture at school, completely without any real map to look into. It's definitely not perfect, but accurate enough to pinpoint all major places with ease. I can proudly say that I still remember Europe with even more details and, to some extent, I am able to draw the rest of the world with all countries, capitals, almost all cities with at least 1 million people, major landscapes, mountain ranges and some rivers too.
As of right now the website have "project" in the name, but it's actually just my fun personal site with my drawings in it. The maps above are just showing what I was able to create and what previous experiences I have.
I don't know. I wish soon, but given limited time and my refusal of making maps in the same or worse technology as I used to make, I don't know when I find the willpower and inspiration to create something new.
When it comes to hand-drawn maps: I don't have them physically anymore, I've thrown them out while moving out. But before I do, I spent an entire day for scanning my old papers, and some of them are shown here. Digitalizing them would be the most sensible approach to finish them, but when I finally got the skillset to make "next generation digital maps" I will have some other ideas than those old doodles.
When it comes to digital maps: I mostly lost my interest in doing static maps and/or I'm too busy.
Well, I really like the complexity, details, colors and icons of comtemporary maps. Medieval/fantasy maps are harder to properly draw and the 'old paper' look is hard to replicate on the widely available white paper. Also I like to draw on graph ruled papersheets (especially when the scale is 1cm - 2km, then each square is equally 1 sqr km which really helps me visualize the space) but it looks really out of place. In general I'm more modernist and not medieval type of guy, but I usually don't go too much far into the future as the technologies and layouts of cities will probably get so alien that it's not that relatable for me, sooo..