A sketchbook or a visual diary.

With the invent of GPS technology and map applications, paper maps are waning in use - but they are an essential material to English artist Ed Fairburn, who uses them as the canvas of his detailed portraits. Fairburn's work is an imaginative incorporation of the human form and topography. He's used maps of places from all over the world. The winding layouts of streets and rivers are enhanced to form wrinkles, veins, and other features of his subjects' faces.

Hand drawn city map of Raalte (called after some Dutch town). The city is situated on two rivers, on of them being an affluent, ending in the other. It's drawn as a city as it could have grown in multiple centuries: city center, former bastions, station close to the river side, apparment buildings from the 70s and newer neighbourhoods surrounding the city. In a word: a very European city. Why it is called Raalte? Well, I just like place names ending on -e and after having made up twenty of them, I started to run out of own names, so started using real place names. 2011.