Thar Be Monsters
In the days of exploration, cartographers would put massive amounts of care and style into their maps. These hand-drawn masterpieces not only convey information to you such as "there is a mountain here" or "this is a sea", but depict vessels sailing on the sea, or frightening monster whales swimming along merrily. Hand-drawn maps have fascinated me ever since I first read The Hobbit and saw Tolkien's own maps of Middle-Earth. Helmink.com is an amazingly extensive library of beautiful hand-drawn maps from hundreds of years ago. I love surfing through this site, looking at the intricate details cartographers would inject into their maps. Since these are all so old I assume they fall under public domain, so you could feasibly use these for your own art mash-ups. Each map is high resolution and would at the very least make fantastic desktop wallpaper. They also sell the original maps, which is handy if you have a couple thousand dollars lying around.
Here's to a lost art made obsolete.
