Something I wanted to do for the Daily Planet Guide to Gotham back in the day was a hack of the Eliot Brown map from No Man's Land # 1, showing where the neighbourhoods - and, as importantly here, the subdistricts of those neighbourhoods - I was talking about in the "City Layout" chapter were in relation to each other. Colour-coded if the budget would allow, but the "B&W + spot colour" scheme that was in effect for the Daily Planet Guide series was certainly flexible enough to allow for it. Alas, that wasn't possible for reasons I won't go into here.

My desire to do such a thing stemmed from an older desire, stemming from my map collection. I've had this collection of maps, atlases and whatnot since I was a grade-school kid. It started with the gas station-issue maps, Esso, Texaco, Conoco(there was this family trip to Yellowstone when I was in grade two or three...long story), and so on. Transit route maps, provincial highway maps, Rand McNally and so on. I look forward to the day when MapArt has every province, territory and USA and Mexican state covered with a volume of its own...ahem.

And that's a longwinded way of introducing you to a project I've been toying with for a few weeks now in a long-abandoned version of CorelDraw: Velvet City.

From Mythical Maps

It's still in progress. I'm not quite happy with the structure of the streets as yet, and I need to nail down the rest of the expressways, airport locations and docks...and some place names, too.

(Yes, budgie_uk, there will be a Budgie Boulevard. :-)