Trefoil.png

I was calling this one "Trefoil," but the world and the map may get a different name as I start to develop the world itself. Started out with a landform I sketched during my lunch break, decided it's been too long since I did any mapping that wasn't tied to climate simulation and calculation things and scanned the pencil coastline in to trace.

I've also been taking the opportunity to give Krita a try; this is the first thing I've really done using the program. My thoughts so far vis-a-vis the GIMP:

Pros - Krita's tablet drawing just feels nice; the results just seem to flow nice and clean. Jury's still out since I haven't used it as much but it also seems to be far less buggy than the GIMP.

Cons - It may be that I haven't found out how to do something analogous in Krita yet, but I'm really missing the GIMP's layer masks; I'd learned to make very heavy use of them for various effects and non-destructive editing. There are fewer fancy filtering options (but then I've been making less and less use of those, mostly, with a couple exceptions I think Krita still has covered).

Overall - I think I like it. There are a few things I'll probably still prefer the GIMP for but I think for maps in a hand-drawn style Krita's liable to become my go-to software.

The linework for the general land shape and features is mostly done at this point; I haven't decided quite how I'm going to color and label the map yet. Once again I've tried to be a bit more delicate with the pen so my end result comes out looking less bold and cartoonish (probably noticeable to anyone who's seen my other isometric maps from past challenges); most likely I imagine finding out if this time's an improvement will have to wait on how I go about coloring and shading.

As regards the "world", for one it probably isn't the whole world since the north of the map is probably not far north of the equator while the south is closing on the polar regions in that direction. I was experimenting with drawing the forested areas; the coniferous forest style in particular took a few tries to hit on something I felt okay with.