Andy Woodruff  · Cartographer | Blog

My maps

Seasonal relief

15 February 2018 with Comments Off on Seasonal relief

Just a map for fun, made without writing any code, which is a nice change of pace. I finally spent a bit of time catching up with the great Daniel Huffman’s excellent tutorial on creating shaded relief maps with Blender. Do try it out if you haven’t; he’s written it up thoroughly and helpfully, showing […]

Camino de Santiago sketch maps

8 January 2018 with Comments Off on Camino de Santiago sketch maps

Back in October in Montréal I finished my term on the NACIS board of directors at the annual conference. (Side note: see video of the conference talks!) Tanya Buckingham (recent NACIS executive director, current candidate for local office) has always kindly handed out thank-you gifts to people who help with the meeting; this time it […]

Beyond the Sea, flowing and exploding edition

1 June 2017 with Comments Off on Beyond the Sea, flowing and exploding edition

Last year I took a whack at mapping what you’d “see” if you looked straight across the ocean from coastlines around the world. Since then, an interactive version of that has been a back-burner idea. Well, finally, here we go. To recap, these arcs represent straight-line paths out to sea, perpendicular to the coastline at […]

The rain on terrain

14 October 2016 with Comments Off on The rain on terrain

If you poured water over the terrain somewhere in the world, where would it go? That’s perhaps one way to think of the thing that distracted me in the evenings this week. [Edit: an interactive map should appear here, but there are some unresolved issues. Check out the GitHub-hosted version for something at least partly […]

Land by latitude and longitude, or, a pile of continents

17 August 2016 with Comments Off on Land by latitude and longitude, or, a pile of continents

Bill Rankin’s graphs of world population by latitude and longitude popped into mind for no particular reason the other day, followed by a silly-sounding question: “but, like, what about land area by latitude and longitude?” Silly because, duh, a chart of land area by latitude and longitude is a map. Then again, a map is […]

Hachures and sketchy relief maps

9 May 2016 with Comments Off on Hachures and sketchy relief maps

I’ve never been a terrain representation expert, but occasionally I get briefly super interested in some DIY technique for relief mapping, not using typical GIS tools or rendering software. Tom Patterson’s old (but still applicable) Photoshop tutorials were my introduction to the magic simplicity of turning a grayscale image into fancy shaded relief. Some years […]