Story Maps

If you know me, you know that I can't draw at all. But I can trace things pretty well as long as there is enough light. So either at the beginning of the month or back in September, I don't remember which, I saw that other NaNo-er's were creating maps of the countries/towns/cities that they will be using in their stories so I had the idea to create one of my own.

When I first had the idea for this I went straight to Google Maps and looked up a couple different towns/cities that I have either lived in or visited and printed out the maps and used them to create the border of my town.

The first outline.

 After creating the outline, it sat around for a while until just recently when I decided to add more to it. So I created a copy of my outline and went to town adding roads, some parks, and a river. I even included little dots to indicate a library, a theater, a middle school, a junior high, a high school, a train station, a rec center, a shopping center, and an area museum.

The overview outline

Since I was in the mood I grabbed my colored pencils and, after making another copy, I colored in the roads, river, etc. that I had just created to make it more lively looking instead of boring and flat.

And when I first started adding in the roads, etc. I was going to create subdivisions and whatever, but when I started tracing the smaller roads weren't showing up so I just drew the larger roads since they were easier to see. Since I still have my original outline I am planning on creating all of the smaller roads and the houses, schools, etc. But I don't know how soon I will be getting to that.