Thread: Southern Ekorra, WIP

I finally got some more work done on this yesterday.

Here's the current version. The lettering has been redone. I'm honestly ready to call the map part more or less finished and put a frame on it.

I changed the name of my major continent, since when I googled it to see if anyone else had used the name I got a bunch of links for Nickelodeon's new Airbender cartoon (Legend of Korra). It seemed like there might be potential for confusion.

Thanks for the compliments, guys.

Originally Posted by RobA

Inkscape has a problem with out/insetting composite paths. The workaround is to break apart the continent path so all the islands ad things are separate paths, then select them all and do the outset.

Thanks. I'll try that next time.

Originally Posted by jbgibson

Even if you wind up using the sketchier wave rings on the one-color style, consider leaving a bit more erasure-glow around labels in the waves.

Hm. I thought the black text on faded blue rings was legible enough, but probably I should add a little glow.

In a related issue, you might tweak the location of IMATHU so the U downstroke doesn't line up with the longitude line.

Good point. I had managed to do the same thing on the relettered version too. And with one of the Ns in ARGNI OCEAN.

For me, having mountains as your only terrain texture works better on the B&W than the colored one. Are you going to add some other textures to indicate forests, etc? My eye wants to read the color map as one big smooth grassy plain, with mountains poking up.

I'm just going to leave it on this map, but yeah, I need to figure out a forest style that looks good with these mountains.

Changes:

I made a frame in Inkscape and colored it in GIMP. It looks kind of flat. I guess I'll try shading it.

Some of the lettering was redone again. I also went and erased the "wave" lines where words were on top of them.

Added a scale and some latitude/longitude numbers.

I didn't leave a good place on the map for a title, so I stuck it into the frame. It might not stay there.

Good job. I'm not always a fan of cased rivers filled with ocean color far upstream, but you made it work well. You did get the lettering more legible. I'm with you on tweaking place names to not match earthly ones - especially in a campaign setting where a map is getting heavily used.

There's maybe enough room beneath Argni Ocean for the title and key, particularly if you come up with a cartouche that matches the rest of your style. Putting it in the border isn't bad per se, but it does minimize it. Kind of makes it a caption instead of a title. Which your almost sentence-length name for the map makes it - caption-like - so perhaps that's the appropriate choice. I have resorted to biggifying the extent of the map to make some open space for labeling, even to the point of then nuking some land in favor of label-able blank sea. If it's not an existing full world where more or less land just there matters, then tweak away. If you're avoiding some feature that would complicate your layout, consider leaving the innermost borderline where it is, and stretch the outer ones to literally create a caption space all across the bottom. That would be an easy way to boost the title visibility. Nobody says borders have to be the same width all the way around, particularly if you're making use of one for a vital map function like key/ title/ notes.

Started nice - has gotten nicer.

Originally Posted by jbgibson

There's maybe enough room beneath Argni Ocean for the title and key, particularly if you come up with a cartouche that matches the rest of your style.

I'll see if I can get that to work. The ocean name could be made smaller.

I have resorted to biggifying the extent of the map to make some open space for labeling, even to the point of then nuking some land in favor of label-able blank sea. If it's not an existing full world where more or less land just there matters, then tweak away.

Heh. Redrawing large portions of the map is more work than I'm willing to do at this point. But what I've learned from this is to do the frame and the title first.

If you're avoiding some feature that would complicate your layout, consider leaving the innermost borderline where it is, and stretch the outer ones to literally create a caption space all across the bottom.

I tried putting the title outside the frame, but I didn't like the way it looked. Maybe if I'd started with a parchment background and made the whole thing look like a page in an old book.

Started nice - has gotten nicer.

Thanks.

Latest WIP: I scrapped the frame on the previous version. I felt something simpler would work better with the style of the map. Redid the latitude/longitude lines (when I realized I'd placed this region farther south than I wanted it) and the scale (which I'd miscalculated). Staring at it now, I see the text that's supposed to line up with latitude lines no longers does so. And a longitude degree label is missing.

All these finishing touches seem more time-consuming than the map itself.

The technical bits always take up a lot of time and kill the fun but when it's done you feel like you accomplished something big and fulfilling.

Wow, this is looking fantastic so far Zaffu!

Cheers,
-Arsheesh