Map of My Childhood

Joel Guthrie

My dad has finally finished his book after 20+ years, and it should be coming out sometime next year! It's about our time living in Scotland and the struggles he went through there, and he asked if I would illustrate a map to be printed on the endsheet, showing all the notable parts of St Andrews where I grew up. I was very excited about this because I am so exceedingly fond of my hometown. Scotland was the best place to grow up, a magical little town that for three years of my early life I actually believed was located somewhere in the Hundred Acre Woods. In fact, my dad wanted the map to look like the one in Winnie-the-Pooh, one of my all-time favorite books.

The interesting challenge with this map was that it couldn't be literal. For instance, the nearby city of Dundee figures largely in the book, but on a map it makes St Andrews look tiny:

Additionally, zooming into St Andrews, many other important places are kind of squished too small here, has too much in-between space there - and you don't get that iconic Fife silhouette (the province it's in):

So in Photoshop, I sketched out a few rough layouts, iterating them layer by layer to be more proportional to the story as opposed to literal geography. Especially important was to capture the path of the Lade Braes, a beautiful nature path that we'd walk frequently, so that took priority. One of the major things I did was essentially cut out all the space between St Andrews and Dundee. And this was the result:

My dad and I were so satisfied with the result. He even made a large print of it at Walgreens and had people color it in with crayons at a student party! I simply adore scanning my eye over it and remembering all these places so special to the both of us. I would highly recommend drawing your own childhood map like this, it's good for the soul! What would yours look like?