Cartoonish Washington state map in semi-nordic style

Video is up! Colored Pencil Hillshade

The North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS) holds a marvelous annual conference, and this year’s was in Tacoma, Washington just 90 minutes down the road from my house. I gave a talk on the techniques I use to draw mountain topography with colored pencils. The first few minutes give a little background of my PNW

A Happy Map

Making maps is fun. As a cartographer, I’m biased to feel this way. Still, when I tell people that map-making is my career, a lot of people respond with “I love maps!” so I am not alone in realizing maps’ awesomeness. At the upcoming Adobe MAX 2019 conference I will be presenting alongside my colleague

Colored Pencil hand-drawn map of area in North Cascades

Drawing Color Hillshade: A tutorial (with time lapse videos)

Last year I shared my technique for drawing hillshade with graphite (pencil). Since then, I have explored a few different methods for drawing color hillshade. I will be sharing one of those methods in this post. This method uses those graphite drawings as the base, or the starting point. So to get started, make sure

Sarah Bell cartographer

Hello visitors

It has been a while since I have done things on this website. I am a cartographer working at a large geospatial software company, so time for a personal website has been rare, but I am hoping to have a more frequent presence here. The choice in this direction is motivated by the many folks