It’s certainly not the first time I make a world map, but I’ve never made one in stained glass. Our planet played a part in the virtual stained glass window that I made of the famous Earthrise photo, but that is not the same.
So it was about time to fill this gap in my collection. And here’s the result!
Virtual glass
The map is made of 1440 pieces of colored glass. Virtual glass, of course, because this artwork was made entirely with the help of Photoshop and a tiny bit of Autocad.
Despite the abstraction, the elements that make our world so beautiful remain clearly visible: the oceans and ice sheets, the forests and the deserts.
Longitude and latitude
I resisted the temptation to make the map more complicated than necessary. The framework simply coincides with the latitude and longitude lines: every five degrees in the east-west direction, every ten degrees in the north-south direction. Furthermore, as the only frivolity, the tropics and the polar circles are shown as dotted lines. And for the equator, of course, I used a slightly thicker piece of virtual lead.
Zooming in
When we zoom in on this stained glass world map, it becomes more abstract. But the experts will easily recognize Europe, North Africa, the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean in the section below. The Netherlands, the country where this map was made, is no longer distinguishable at this scale. Somewhere at the top of the green field, in the middle of the second row, I guess.
