Travel the world right from the comfort of your home with this gorgeous hand-painted watercolour world map! The minimalist design makes it perfect as wall art, nursery decor, or a learning poster. Great gift for teachers, parents, or avid travellers. Illustrated by Singaporean mum and artist Laura Or. This is a digital product. No physical product will be shipped.Suggested printing sizes: 60 x 90cm, 90 x 120cmPhoto credit: @riotofroses Is the map to scale? 1. Is the map to scale? It's complicated! No world map is completely to scale - it's just not possible to turn a globe into a flat rectangular shape without some stretching. But if you're talking about the COUNTRIES - yes, they are roughly to scale. In order to preserve the shape and sizes of the countries, I dramatically compressed the oceans (the Atlantic Ocean in particular is muchhhh bigger in real life!). I also chose to enlarge many of the smallest countries (otherwise you wouldn't be able to see them at all). These include: Caribbean islands (in between North and South America) Pacific islands (northeast of Australia) European microstates (Andorra, Liechtenstein, Malta, Monaco, San Marino, Vatican City) Singapore For island groups (Bahamas, Maldives, Seychelles, etc), I tried to preserve the overall size of the island group, but enlarge the individual islands so that you can see the shape of the islands rather than just a series of far-apart dots. Where's Antarctica? 2. Why didn't you include Antarctica? When drawing this map, my priority was to preserve the shape and relative size of the various countries. I also focused on where the people are (that's how I decided which islands to include and exclude). Antarctica and the Arctic are both round in shape, but it's not possible to show this in a traditional rectangular map (they tend to look like a flat border at the top or bottom of the map). Since it was not possible to accurately portray their shape and location on the map, and there is no permanent human population there anyway, I decided to leave both the Arctic and Antarctica out of this map. Why is Russia two colours? 3. Why is Russia two colours? Russia is a transcontinental country, which means it spans two continents (Europe and Asia). The purple section is European Russia, which makes up roughly 25% of Russia's area. If you're thinking that the purple section looks bigger than 1/3 the red section - you're right! I had to stretch European Russia, because otherwise it would look like Europe was an island. How did you decide where to cut Russia into Europe vs Asia? The Ural Mountains (a mountain range that stretches from the Kara Sea in the Arctic Ocean to northwestern Kazakhstan) are typically considered the border between Europe and Asia. Other FAQ 4. Isn't Greenland/Canada/Alaska bigger than that? Nope! We are used to thinking of northern countries like Canada and Greenland as really huge, because the world maps we usually look at follow the Mercator Projection (this is what Google Maps uses). But actually Greenland is muchhhh smaller than Brazil or Russia. You can check out thetruesize.com - it's a fun interactive site that shows you how Google Maps actually distorts the sizes of countries quite a bit! 5. Did you draw this by hand / from scratch? Yes! I am not tracing over any existing map. I got maps of the individual countries and traced over them by hand, then pieced the individual countries together into continents, before putting all the continents together. All the country labels are written by me.
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