Rivers of Plastic by John Nelson

I am impressed by the “Principle Rivers/Mountains/Lakes” map diagrams that were so popular in the mid 1800s and have been curious about how I might reproduce that aesthetic without etching on copper plates and hand tinting. Then I saw a tweet which led me to this article in Nature Communications about the top plastic waste contributing rivers in the world and I thought it might be just the right excuse to try it out. So I focused on the top three rivers and sampled paper and ink textures from an 1850 Atlas of Physical Geography and went at it. Here is the result…