It’s fun every now and then to play with Stamen Design’s Map Stack. Tonight as I was playing with it in part to wind down from a long work week, my 3-year-old requested a pink and purple map.

So, a pink and purple map. I can do that:

The cool thing about Map Stack, is I can share a link for my creation (click on the link above image), but I can also now embed this in a QGIS map.

http://mapstack.stamen.com/edit.html#watercolor%5Bsat=0%5D;color:$ff3030%5Bmask=!mapbox-water,comp=multiply,alpha=50%5D;toner-hybrid;color:$8629a6%5Bmask=!mapbox-water,comp=multiply,alpha=50%5D;color:$60c9fe%5Bmask=mapbox-water,comp=multiply,alpha=60%5D/2/30.1/-48.3

I can embed the link to that map in a specially crafted XML file that can be loaded in QGIS or many projects that use the GDAL library:

<GDAL_WMS>
    <Service name="TMS">
        <ServerUrl>http://a.sm.mapstack.stamen.com/((watercolor,$fff[hsl-saturation]),(mapbox-water,$ff3030[source-out@p])[multiply@50],toner-hybrid,(mapbox-water,$8629a6[source-out@p])[multiply@50],(mapbox-water,$60c9fe[source-in])[multiply@60])/${z}/${x}/${y}.png</ServerUrl>
    </Service>
    <DataWindow>
        <UpperLeftX>-20037508.34</UpperLeftX>
        <UpperLeftY>20037508.34</UpperLeftY>
        <LowerRightX>20037508.34</LowerRightX>
        <LowerRightY>-20037508.34</LowerRightY>
        <TileLevel>18</TileLevel>
        <TileCountX>1</TileCountX>
        <TileCountY>1</TileCountY>
        <YOrigin>top</YOrigin>
    </DataWindow>
    <Projection>EPSG:3857</Projection>
    <BlockSizeX>256</BlockSizeX>
    <BlockSizeY>256</BlockSizeY>
    <BandsCount>3</BandsCount>
    <Cache />
</GDAL_WMS>