Does anyone else like to draw completely fictitious maps?

[Quillz]

For as long as I can remember, I've loved looking at maps, road atlases, etc. And ever since I've been little, I've enjoyed making my own, completely fake maps. To most people they just think I've drawn a bunch of random lines on a page, but to this day I still love to draw fake maps. I've even gone back and given every single line various made up names. I've probably drawn hundreds, maybe even thousands, and I keep them all in various binders and things.

Am I completely weird or what?

[Alex]

I drew so many when I was a kid, but most were lost/thrown away. Many of mine were spoofs of existing cities. In my 1986 Gousha road atlas still lies a spoof of Omaha!

[Quillz]

Yeah, I should say that most of my maps were heavily inspired by real places. I've drawn many that are based off the San Fernando Valley, for example, and then a few that are based on mountain towns that have twisty roads that don't adhere to any sort of grid pattern or anything.

I saved them all because it's weird looking back and seeing how terrible some of the ones that I drew are back when I was five or six years old.

[Alex]

It was easier for me to draw completely fictitious maps when I was younger. The older I got, the more I ended up mirroring existing places. I still have one notebook from high school in storage and a few college notebooks loaded with maps in the back hanging around too.

[huskeroadgeek]

I don't think I ever actually drew a map of it, but I created a fictitious city when I was little that I had the major streets and a freeway set out in my mind. I even imagined where the freeway exits were and what the signs looked like.

[74/171FAN]

Yeah I've drawn fictitious maps many times back in high school and before but now the only ones I draw when I have time are a VA version of the Myrtle Beach, SC area on a fictitious island east of the Eastern Shore and then a spoof of my home county Prince George, VA with the population growing similar to that of Loudoun County, VA

[mightyace]

I drew a few in my time.

My largest was a pair of fictitious states within a 350 mile square located in an area centered by real Oklahoma and hence getting parts of Texas, Kansas, and, possibly, Missouri, Arkansas and Louisiana.

The one state, Squarius (and yes I know it's a lame name!), was the upper quadrant of the square.  (i.e. 175x175 miles)  It had a main tollway running diagonally across the state with a single long extension running in the south and southeast of the state like the Pennsy Turnpike.  The rest of the interstates and freeways were free highways.  The capital was a city call Ellis which was a little north and east of dead center in the state.  And, yes, the state highway symbol was a boring square.  I even copied a section of Columbia county Pennsylvania in there with my hometown in the southeast corner of the state.  That's near the real Ozarks so the topography wasn't too far off.

The other state, Lamus, which occupied the other three quarters of the square, was my main focus.  It's capital way eponymous.  It had an extensive toll system inspired by real-life Oklahoma and Kentucky.  Only a minority of the interstate mileage in the state was free highway.  The Lamus Toll System was privately owned and was a pioneer in using automated machines to take prepaid card, bills as well as coins for it's ticket system exits.  Now, this was back in the 70s so I was WAY ahead of the trends as all this has come to pass along with Electronic Tolling which no one imagined back then.  The LTS service plazas also had motels.  The Lamus state highway symbol is the state shape.  (I'll have to make some mockups to show it properly.)  The state had some 4 digit highway numbers.

The interstate and US systems in this alternate US were the reverse of our numbering systems with the US highways being low in the southwest and the Interstate low in the northeast.  East west interstates 82, 84, 86 and 88 crossed E-W and 39 and 41 went north south.  I-41 was carried on the original Lamus Turnpike.

Now, I twice attempted to make this map and only really got the freeways defined.  The first map is long gone and I'm pretty sure the second is, too.

I also remembered one I drew for Abescon, NJ.  Abescon is a real place name in the Atlantic City area, but in mine it became the resort city's name.


Other then that, I mainly drew exits.

[triplemultiplex]

Just ask every notebook I've had since Middle School.  You could tell how boring the class was based on how many interchanges and made up towns were sketched in the margins.  Now in the workplace I occasionally find my self in meetings doing the same thing.

I also recall creating a fake island country at some point that I could populate with towns and roads.  The catch with that one was deciding on a brief geologic history that would explain the shape of the island and the land features it's civilization would have to contend with.  It was something about an extinct volcano and an ice age that made this great natural harbor.

[kj3400]

If I had a nickel for all the maps I've been drawing, I'd.....have a lot of nickels. Seriously though, I've been drawing maps since about 10, and I still do. This time around, I plan on using them in SimCity 4.

[Alps]

If I had a nickel for all the maps I've been drawing,

If you go by a nickel per square foot, I'd probably have about $100 worth of accumulated maps by now in various places.

[froggie]

Used to draw completely fictitious maps, mostly back during high school.  It's slowly died down over the years, to where over the past 5 or so years, I haven't done it at all, preferring instead to concentrate on GIS mapping utilizing existing maps as a baseline.

[Ian]

I make fictitious maps anytime I have free time to do so. However unlike a lot of other people who detail the road when drawing things like interchanges, I just draw lines. Later on I can post photos of what I've done recently.

[Duke87]

All 11,135 miles of Interstate 316 on the planet Xngue:


An old scan of the first page:


Complicated interchange at mile 1090:


This whole "project" took me over five years.


Cookie if you can guess what brand of maps most influenced my style.

[yanksfan6129]

Hagstrom?

[Alps]

I make fictitious maps anytime I have free time to do so. However unlike a lot of other people who detail the road when drawing things like interchanges, I just draw lines. Later on I can post photos of what I've done recently.

I know more than one person who does it that way.  You're not alone.

[Quillz]

I don't use color, I just use pencil and pen. I would like to use color when I draw but I find that I redo things so often that it's pretty much impossible to work with anything that can't be quickly erased.

[Duke87]

Hagstrom?

[Roadsign199qc]

I draw roads too.

[hbelkins]

I did that a lot when I was a kid. Didn't save any of them, though.

[Cheesehead77]

Guilty.   Got through class by reading ahead in the assigned novels, as well as drawing maps on the covers we made for our textbooks.  This was in middle school.

On some, the roads were just drawn as lines, whereas others had the roads spec'd out.  My maps were generally fictional rural areas with small towns, lakes, resorts and parks.  Fun times.

[kurumi]

I still doodle all the time. When there was time to play SimCity, I would maintain a map of the area. Here's a PDF of a map several revs back: http://www.kurumi.com/roads/simcity/maps/tc1989.pdf

[WillWeaverRVA]

I still do from time to time...

[BigMattFromTexas]

Nah not weird at all. This is "Tyson, TX"



BigMatt

[Quillz]

Nah not weird at all. This is "Tyson, TX"
[snip]
BigMatt

Damn, that looks really good! At least compared to the kind of things I usually draw.

[elsmere241]

I still doodle all the time.  Some of my drawings have been quite elaborate over the years - I wish I'd saved some of them.

I remember in school if I was bored, imagining that the ceiling tiles were city blocks and the "blocks" with lights were parks.  If there was a track for a classroom divider, I'd imagine it was the railroad tracks.

I started college pursuing civil engineering so that I could lay out neighborhoods or even whole cities for real.  I wound up getting a degree in planning, and all my work (and post-grad studies) has been in GIS.