Why I Started to Draw Maps

It's funny how some passions find their way back to you, no matter how long you’ve strayed from them. For me, that passion was maps. I grew up fascinated by antique maps, those beautifully hand-drawn representations of lands both real and imagined, filled with elaborate compass roses, sea creatures in the oceans, and tiny calligraphic place names that told stories of ancient civilizations and explorers. I didn’t just love looking at them—I wanted to create them. Fast forward to university, where I chose to study urbanism. It seemed like a natural extension of my fascination with places and how people interact with them. I dove into studies of city planning, transportation networks, and the evolution of urban spaces. But something was missing. The raw, artistic, and deeply personal aspect of cartography—the kind that antique maps carried—wasn’t really present in the technical drawings and GIS maps I was working with. I still loved map...