As a Christmas gift, I wanted to paint a map of the lake where my parents always go on vacation. I'd seen some mass-produced map art that I wanted to emulate, but I wanted to personalize my map and make it with love.

To start, I found the map on Google Maps so that I could see the general shape and outline of it.

Next, to get the gradation between lake depths, I found the lake in a couple different nautical map resources.

Using a combination of the aerial view from Google Maps and the nautical depth maps, I was able to create an illustration of the lake.

I added some other details to the design:

And painted it in a custom built frame!

If you're really interested in how I got the image from an illustrator file onto the frame... Well I'll talk about that another time.