Fantasy Maps, Watercolor and TikTok

One of my favorite things about being an artist is finding other creative people who make you immediately want to sit down and create something. That’s exactly what happened when I came across @emmamadhatter on TikTok.

She creates fantasy maps in one of the coolest ways I’ve seen. Instead of sketching island shapes from scratch, she uses crystals, dice, and other objects to build the land masses first. She’ll scatter them across the paper, trace around the shapes to form coastlines, and then develop the map from there with ink and detail work. Every map ends up feeling organic and unpredictable, like a real place instead of something overly planned out.

We actually met through @dirtyoardice on TikTok. Every Friday he features artists in his Artist Spotlight of the Week, and we had both been featured there. After seeing her work, I messaged the group chat of featured artist because her maps genuinely made me want to try painting one myself. Instead of just talking about it, she suggested we collaborate on a piece together, and I immediately said yes.

Honestly, this ended up being a pretty meaningful project for me. I realized while working on it that this is the first collaboration I’ve done with another artist in about four years. Art can get surprisingly solitary sometimes, especially when you spend most of your time working alone in a studio or posting into the void online. There was something really refreshing about working on a piece that already had someone else’s imagination built into it before I ever touched a brush.

Once she finished the map itself, she mailed it to me to paint. I worked entirely in watercolor and focused on bringing atmosphere into the piece without losing the handmade fantasy-map feeling that made me love it in the first place. I added the compass rose at the bottom painted with the ocean and included the sea monster because every good fantasy map deserves at least one thing lurking offshore. All that’s needed now is Emmas signature.

MERC