by WisCartography

Green Lake

About this Map

This map of Green Lake is one of my personal favorites in the WisCartography collection. I spent a lot of time carefully putting this one together, and I especially love the composition: the long, sweeping shape of Green Lake across the page, the surrounding landscape, and the fish illustrations tucked into the lower-right corner all seem to balance one another particularly well. It is one of those maps where, to my eye, all of the pieces simply came together.

I also really like the texture of the surrounding landscape and the way its soft greens, tans, and blues work together with the stronger blue of the lake. Green Lake itself provides plenty of visual interest. Its irregular shoreline, bays, points, and surrounding smaller lakes give the map a lot to explore without making it feel crowded.

But perhaps the most striking feature is the depth of Green Lake. As Wisconsin's deepest natural inland lake, its underwater topography gives the map an entirely different character from most of the lakes I have mapped. The depth contours sweep across the lake and tighten dramatically in places, revealing just how quickly the bottom drops away from portions of the shoreline. I love maps that make something normally hidden visible, and on this map the remarkable shape of Green Lake beneath the water becomes an important part of the artwork itself.