Create an interactive watercolor globe
In this blog post I want to show you how you can steal some of John Nelson's watercolor styles and use them on an interactive web globe. I used this style to depict happy moments collected for a research about happiness. You can check out the application here: What makes us happy?
For the countries I used Dylan Moriarty's hand drawn style of country boundaries from Project Linework. I applied John's styles on the country polygons (orange for countries that have happy moments and gray for the ones that don't). Publishing them as a feature layer or a vector tile layer will not work because the symbols use multiple picture fill symbol layers which are not supported on the web or as vector tile styles. So I published them as a tile layer, you can find it here.
For the graticule I used John Nelson's Firefly grid data (Oceans 5 degrees). And for the ocean, I created a rectangular polygon with the extent of the whole world and then I applied the Pairwise erase tool in the Analysis toolbox. Finally I applied John's Pacific Blue symbol.
The final globe looks like this and you can interact with it here.
Hope that this inspired you for some painted mapping projects,
Raluca