Creating a Unique Procedurally Generated Map: An Artistic Journey Inspired by Jerry Gretzinger

Maps, Hexagons, and the Art of Letting Rules Guide the Brush

Maps have long been tools for navigation and storytelling, but what happens when a map is not just a representation of the real world, but a creation of pure imagination? This blog is the beginning of that journey — a project that has not yet produced a single map tile, but already has a philosophy, a system, and a set of handmade cards ready to guide what comes next.

The Inspiration Behind the Map

Jerry Gretzinger has spent decades adding layers, details, and stories to a vast imaginary world drawn on an ever-expanding piece of paper. His work blurs the lines between cartography, storytelling, and art, and it is one of the inspirations behind this project. Like Jerry, I use a set of rules combined with randomness to decide what gets created next — but the medium, the method, and the madness are entirely different.

The Medium: Hexagonal Wooden Tiles on a Wall

The map will be built from hexagonal wooden pieces, each 15 centimetres across and about 8 millimetres thick. They are magnetized, which means they attach to a metal plate on the wall and can be rearranged, expanded, and modified over time. The wall display is partly practical — the tiles need to live somewhere — but it also means the project exists as a permanent, ever-changing installation. It is a map you walk past every day and find slightly different each time.

Because the tiles have physical thickness, the finished piece sits on the wall somewhere between a poster and a relief sculpture. Every tile is drawn, painted, and crafted entirely by hand. No automated process creates the art. AI occasionally helps with documentation — like writing this blog — but the making itself is manual, physical, and deliberate.

A Life Spent Making Things

This project draws on a long and varied creative history. I attended art school from the age of nine to sixteen, working with clay, paper, wood, and other materials, and have painted everything from miniatures to murals. I am also an avid gamer and roleplayer, and maps of all kinds have been a constant thread through all of it — drawn on paper, built in digital tools, and yes, occasionally constructed in MS Excel, which is a more capable artistic medium than most people give it credit for.

The Rules: Six Numbers, One Tile at a Time

Rather than a computational algorithm, this project runs on a hand-designed rule system driven by randomness. Each new tile — or modification to an existing one — begins with drawing six numbered cards, each a different colour, each carrying a different kind of meaning.

The blue number determines the highest level of detail: what material or surface the tile will be covered with. Green, yellow, and red define the finer details — positioning, shapes, markings, and the visual character of the tile. Brown is a decision number, indicating how many activities to carry out or which path to take at a fork. And black is the non-map number: it directs activity outside the tiles themselves — decorating the card deck, writing blog posts, taking photographs, documenting the process.

Originally the idea was to use dice, as Jerry uses a card deck. But building a proper deck felt more in keeping with the spirit of the project. The cards themselves will be decorated over time, when the numbers say so.

How the Map Grows

One of the most interesting properties of this system is bleeding. When a modification is made to a tile, the rules determine whether that change bleeds into neighbouring tiles. A mountain range that begins on one tile might spread across several, and as it does, roads shift to accommodate it, settlements adjust, and the whole map quietly reorganises itself around the new reality. Everything cascades from randomness, and nothing is entirely planned.

This means the map is never finished in the traditional sense. It is always mid-sentence.

Where Things Stand

At the moment, the base card deck has been created and is waiting to be decorated when the numbers eventually call for it. The hexagonal tiles have been ordered and are about to arrive. The rules for tile creation are nearly complete — though they will almost certainly be revised as the process unfolds and the black number sends me back to the rulebook.

No map tile has yet been made. The project is poised at the very beginning.

What Comes Next

The first tile will be created when the system says it is time. What it will look like is genuinely unknown. That is the point.

This is map-making as an ongoing art practice — part craft, part chance, part willingness to be surprised by your own rules.