There’s a wealth of fantasy novels in our Library collections, and some of them include maps that describe mysterious lands, challenging journeys and alien cultures.
Can you think of your favourite book containing a map? Some of our favourites are:
Our map includes symbols from maths and magic, as well as normal topographical maps. It could be directions to a lost treasure, a battle plan or maybe an early version of town planning. Let your imagination run wild and make your own fabulous fantasy map!
Use your pencil to sketch the main shapes on your map, for example a river, a mountain, or a town. It might help to imagine what you would see when travelling across the landscape and where the dangerous areas would be. Make sure there’s lots of detail.
As this is a map, most things should be drawn from a bird’s eye view, but this isn’t a strict rule, so include other types of drawing and writing if you want to. Can you spot the runes, letters, magic and maths symbols we’ve used?
Once you’re happy with your sketch, go over the pencil lines in black pen.
Next, tear off all the straight edges.
Scrunch the paper up tight, squeeze it, then flatten it out again.
Put your map on a wipeable surface. Splodge cold tea over the map using the teabag to make the map look old. It’s good if some of the black pen smudges as this gives the impression the map has been well used. If it gets too wet, use the kitchen roll to sop up some of the liquid.
Fold the map as if you were going to carry it in your pocket and press down on the folds. If the map was very old, these folds would be quite damaged, so gently tear a little way along a couple of them.
Final step - rub some of the dry earth along the torn edges of the map. We’ve also used a bit more tea to highlight the map folds and made a small hole in the middle.
You could display your map or write a story to accompany it. Aberdeenshire Libraries have great fantasy books with maps to inspire you, such as The Narnia Chronicles by CS Lewis, Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien, the Game of Thrones series by George RR Martin and the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett.
We’d love to see what you make or write, email us at summerreadingchallenge@aberdeenshire.gov.uk