Van Gogh is NOT a Cartographer

I don't imagine many people were taken in by my April Fools joke about Vincent Van Gogh's long lost map of Amsterdam.

The map is actually an old vintage map of Amsterdam which has been processed by a Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style. This algorithm allows you to combine the content of one image with the style of another image. To create my Van Gogh map of Amsterdam I applied the style taken from a Van Gogh painting to the content of an old vintage map of Amsterdam.

I was actually quite disappointed with the results. I hoped to be able to create a map which looked far more genuinely like a Van Gogh painting than the smudged map I ended up with.

In order to overlay the pretend Van Gogh map on top of a modern map of Amsterdam I used Mapbox. To do this I used the ImageOverlay with georeferenced scanned map example from the Mapbox documentation. I added an opacity slide control to the Mapbox example map. This opacity control can be found in the Opacity control Mapbox example.