Ed fairburn

The contours of vintage maps provide inspiration for English artist Ed Fairburn's intricate cross-hatched portraits.

above: Windermere, Pencil on a cropped map of the English Lakes – specifically Lake Windermere. Cardiff-based illustrator Ed Fairburn sees things in maps most of us do not. His map-based portraits combine the art of cartography with the drawing of the human face. Making the curves and lines of the two dimensional terrain (or the heavens as is the case with his celestial drawings) blend with the curves and lines of human features brings a dimensionality to both the maps and the portraits. The…

Seattle – Ed Fairburn

British artist Ed Fairburn creates amazing hand-drawn portraits using old road maps and charts as his canvases.

Windermere by Ed Fairburn such talent and amazing to see in person!

For my project I need to find relevant street maps and recreate them in a interesting, artistic way. It should depict how visitors see and experience the areas. Conventional maps can be very grey a…

Eye drawing inspired by Ed Fairburn

Ed Fairburn has an uncanny ability to make visual connections with various map elements and human facial features.

Lake District National Park – Ed Fairburn

Ed Fairburn

Ed Fairburn

Ed fairburn Die Milche-Strasse (The Milky Way), pencil on a celestial star chart

With the invent of GPS technology and map applications, paper maps are waning in use - but they are an essential material to English artist Ed Fairburn, who uses them as the canvas of his detailed portraits. Fairburn's work is an imaginative incorporation of the human form and topography. He's used maps of places from all over the world. The winding layouts of streets and rivers are enhanced to form wrinkles, veins, and other features of his subjects' faces.

Using a wide variety of canvases including railroad blueprints, star charts, geological and street maps, Welsh artist Ed Fairburn (previously here and here) uses additive and subtractive techniques to create portraits that seem pefectly integrated with the topography of streets, mountains and rivers. It’s been almost a year since we last checked in with Fairburn whose process and approach to creating these stunning portraits continues to evolve. One of his most striking methods is to…

Ed Fairburn Studio Store

Artist Ed Fairburn originals