My illustration process - Creating an illustrated map

Here is the finished map of Park Hill Park which, if you follow me on Instagram, you may have seen me working on earlier in the year. The park is only five minutes walk from the busy East Croydon Station and is a lovely place to spend a sunny lunch hour or have a break from the busy town centre.

Rough stage
I’ve put a series of images below showing how I worked through the process with the Park Hill Friends group who commissioned the piece. First stage was to create a black and white line rough based on the brief. I went round the park with them and took photographs of particular places that they wanted to be included.

B&W Rough

Creating the artwork
Once the rough had been approved, I moved on to the artwork stage. I painted each of the elements separately so that I didn't have to worry about the sizes being too fiddly to draw. I then scanned the images and put them together on Photoshop, placing each image on a separate layer so that I could move them around and make changes.

Additions and corrections

This is the first artwork I sent. You can see there are a few differences from the final one at the top. The newly instated cycle path had to be added, an addition road name plus more information relating to social media contact information.