Skyrim Fan Shows Off Incredible Hand-Drawn Version of the Game’s Map

Key Takeaways

• A hand-drawn Skyrim map impresses the Reddit community with intricate detail and passion for The Elder Scrolls series.
• Skyrim’s vast world continues to captivate fans, inspiring tributes like this remarkable hand-drawn map.
• The map creator revealed that traditional India ink and watercolor were used to create the incredible artwork.

One The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim fan has showcased their love for the game by creating a hand-drawn version of its map, and the results were impressive. This real-life version of the Skyrim map took an immense amount of artistry to complete, and the game’s community on Reddit has taken notice of the impressive artwork.

While Starfield is the biggest Bethesda-developed game due to its over 1,000 planets to explore, the open world of Skyrim is fondly remembered by many gamers. When the game was released in 2011, it offered one of the more expansive worlds for gamers to explore. Thanks to its size, the province of Skyrim offered many scenic destinations, such as the Forgotten Vale, Sovngarde, and Blackreach, to name a few. Over the years, fans have come up with many tributes to these beautiful locations encountered while playing the game.

One of these tributes comes thanks to ddsmithstudio, who recently combined their passion for cartography and The Elder Scrolls series by creating a hand-drawn map of the province of Skyrim. As seen in the artist’s images, the fan-created map featured a staggering level of detail. According to ddsmithstudio, the map was made using traditional India ink and watercolor, giving the parchment an aged appearance. Along with including all the names of important locations in Skyrim, the artist included rivers, mountains, and trees to help illustrate the topography of the game world. They even included a picture of a dragon, potentially Alduin, in the bottom left corner next to the map’s name.

Given the map’s incredible quality, the response on the Skyrim subreddit has been unsurprisingly positive. With more than 800 upvotes already, fans have been very supportive of the artist’s efforts, with some pointing out the hard work necessary to complete the project. In the comments, ddsmithstudio revealed they worked on the project periodically for approximately a month and used the poster and Skyrim‘s in-game map as some of their references. The artist also said that handwriting and calligraphy were significant passions of theirs, making this artwork even more enjoyable for them to work on.

Fan projects like ddsmithstudio’s Skyrim map show the enduring legacy of the game more than a decade after its initial release. In fact, the game continues to pull in thousands of concurrent players on platforms like Steam in 2024. With the wait for The Elder Scrolls 6 likely a few years away at the earliest, gamers will continue to return to Skyrim in the interim.