Thread: July Entry: Grandmother's Tale (aka Red Riding Hood)

Superb! It really has the illustrative qualities of a fairy tale drawing! I love the place names as well, each one conjures up a fairy tale in my mind! And you've found a great use for the triangular escarpment symbols too (which I've been trying to work out recently).

Great work!

Ravs

I agree! This is well done and definitely captures the true spirit of the metaphoric ideals of the story. Well done.

Haha! Well done!! Loooove the place names--they add so much to the thematic significance you describe in your intro. Great, just great.

I'm likin' the way ye did the Conscience river and how the foresty area sort of clears just enough to show the path of the river through it...

I like the way the rivers themselves look...

I like the fractal outline along the road... it's just awesome how somethings so simple conveys so much. I'm refering to the fact that i can tell that all that green area is a forest even though there is no foresty texture save for the edges.

Very nice.

Thanks everybody! I'll give it the once-over tomorrow morning and decide whether to submit it as-is or make a few tweaks. I try to give this sort of thing a few days of "downtime" so that I can see the work with fresh eyes.

Regarding the style, thanks again for the comments. I'm looking at most of the maps here, the styles are a quite different from mine and frnakly, I wasn;t sure if folks would like my style. The Photorealistic angle doesn't really work well with illustrator, and I prefer a very simple clean line for my own work (when I do it it looks somewhat shabby, although I certainly can and do like that look when done by others more capable than myself -- I guess that it would be analogous to a musician who is accomplished in one type of music but appreciates other forms even if he doesn't have the knack for them). There is also a practical angle, most of my work gets printed in black and white, so there really is no need for a lot of color and many of the more subtle details would be lost anyway.

I'm very glad people seem to like this however.

Originally Posted by Duvik

I'm likin' the way ye did the Conscience river and how the foresty area sort of clears just enough to show the path of the river through it...

I like the way the rivers themselves look...

I like the fractal outline along the road... it's just awesome how somethings so simple conveys so much. I'm refering to the fact that i can tell that all that green area is a forest even though there is no foresty texture save for the edges.

Very nice.

One interesting thing about the road: it isn't really a fractal. I applied a pattern to the stroke of the road which is an amalgam of larger dots than those used for the roadbed. By making the stroke 3 points wide it gives the broken appearance. Thus it defines without overwhelming and looks very fractal-like because of the irregular way that I lay the road and the way that pattern fills/strokes work in Illustrator.

I have in the past (a recent map for HERO Games) used different methods to do this: a dotted line that I have given an irregular dash-gap ratio then applied a guassian blur to, but frankly I like this method a whole lot more. Plus it is a lot easier.

I try to do everything (map-wise) in that spare style, convey as much as you can with as little as possible and that sort of thing. Sometimes I come up short, but here I have been very happy with the outcome.

Updated (and Final) Version. Not really all that much in the line of changes.

I presume that I do not need to post this on a "fresh" thread??