Creta Maris

Creta Maris Beach Resort is one of the oldest hotels in Hersonissos, Crete, Greece, a well organized tourism destination. The hotel holds a vast area and it includes a large unit of bungalows, swimming pools, restaurants and traditional taverns, a waterpark and numerous other facilites, offering their customers a complete and warm Cretan hospitality.

The management of the hotel wanted to produce an illustrated or – even better – a painted map, which would depict all the necessary information in an attractive and elegant print. One side of the map should illustrate an oblique panoramic view of the overall hotel premises, while the other side should accomodate a top-view plan in an accurate scale.

They also wanted this print to be quite small when folded, in the standard size of a card. The print should have a hard cover with a strong pocket to hold the map itself as well as the customer’s room card

I was lucky enough to have Thomas – my brother – who is an artist and a skilled painter, so I called him, the moment I was commissioned with this project, to examine all the details and the requirements and the data we should collect in order to produce and deliver it.

I collected as many aerial photographs as possible and together with the management team of the hotel we selected which one should be used for the oblique view (thankfully they already had a good archive from helicopter captured photos).

I sent the photographs to Thomas and he started to paint. He created a freestyle, watercolor on aquarelle paper, painting of the oblique panoramic view of the hotel.

The final result was far beyond my expectations! The painting was a piece of art and, at the same time, geographically accurate, since it was produced from a real aerial photo. It was so beautiful, I didn’t want to “spoil” it with my cold GIS derived points and letters and stuff. But I had to.

Eventually, I scanned the final painting in very high resolution, I made a couple of corrections and enhancements in Adobe Photoshop and I loaded it in ArcGIS Pro.

Meanwhile, I had already collected the points of interest within the hotel and I hade produced a numbered list of them, so I placed them on top of the painting, at their correct locations. These numbers are referenced on the copy that describes the facilities and services offered by the hotel.

The panorama side had finished. It was about time to start painting the top-view side. We followed the same approach. Thomas painted the overall plan of the hotel in watercolor. This was a far more difficult task, since the top-view should be literally accurate and in a correct scale.

At the same time, I was visiting the hotel with my GPS device and I was collecting information which I further transformed to geographic information in my geodatabase. I also used existing architectural plans of the hotel in DWG, which I georeferenced on ArcGIS Pro. Every facility, every room, every necessary information, that should be visible on map, was actually a feature layer in the geodatabase.

When Thomas finished the top-view, I scanned it and introduced it to ArcGIS Pro as a georeferenced raster layer. Upon the painting I plotted all the required features and I annotated them.

I used the folds of the map (which were a lot) as cells for a local index reference system. Actually, the gridlines are the fold lines of the final print! Every point on map, eventually, was given their correspondent local coordinates, which are included on the legend. Both sides of the print are connected with these coordinates.

The final print is available at the reception desk of the hotel and is freely distributed to the hotel’s customers. It serves both as a map and as the room’s card holder.

Title	Creta Maris Beach Resort
Map Scale	1:1,400
Medium	Paper
Year	2019
Location	Hersonissos, Crete, Greece
Dimensions	Width 48cm / Height 33cm
Cover Dimensions	Width 5.33cm / Height 8.25cm
Client	Creta Maris Beach Resort
Expertise	ArcGIS Pro, Adobe Photoshop
Artwork	Thomas Staridas