Street artist Nils Westergard created this intricate map of the streets of Amsterdam in the form of a leaf cut out from paper with an X-Acto knife. He did an impromptu “ask me anything” style interview within the comment section of a post about the map on Reddit to explain why and how he created the map (as well as more information in his own Reddit post). Westergard, who is based out of Richmond, Virginia explains that Amsterdam is like a second home to him. He spends a couple of months out of every year in the Dutch city. He was biking from Utrecht to Amsterdam came across a skeleton of a large Linden tree leaf which inspired him to create a map merged with the shape of the leaf. For the original project, Westergard pasted versions of the Amsterdam leaf map onto walls around the city of Amsterdam with each pasted map bearing a red “you are here” dot.”
In 2015, ten stencil and spray can maps of his leaf map of Amsterdam were created and sold.
The cut out 60 x 65cm map took Westergard about 100 hours to make.
