Hey everyone,
I'm new to the community, but have always enjoyed the painstaking time and effort it takes to construct an amazing map for my D&D games. Here is the latest map I'm working on, which is an urban campaign that takes places exclusively on, below, above, under, and around the city.
I'm not sure about the colors yet, and I'm still thinking of ways to better convey the shallow waters. Also, if anyone has any tips for drawing a flooded cemetery I would be interested in hearing!
Thanks
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Hi Redstar - and welcome to the Guild!
The colours work fine for me (it's a tried and tested colour combination) - did you make the map with CC3? I really do like the way you've depicted the buildings - it works well to the perceived scale of the drawing. It's a really convincing map. Presumably there are more buildings to come?
If shallow waters are to be an important part of the map, you could contours, but I'd suggest not having them outlined in black and maybe feathering them a bit.
The map is very evocative of the Waterdeep map for Forgotten Realms around the 90's. My only suggestion (and it's only a suggestion based on my preference) is to make the buildings a different color than the ground, to give it a little contrast.
Daniel the Neon Knight: Campaign Cartographer User
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Hi Redstar-
Thanks for joining up and showing us your work. I like the map colours, as well. As suggested, setting the building fill to something other than the ground would help them to stand out.
As to the cemetery - how about just drawing the usual items (crypts, large tombstones, paths, etc) then using water colours in the flooded areas? I might make it clearer, too, if you only make a portion of the cemetery flooded.
-Rob A>
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Thanks for the feedback everyone!
On colors: I actually color selected them directly from the Waterdeep City of Splendor book. I have a bad eye for colors, so I wanted to start with something that i perceived as looking good. I was worried the water looked a little too sky-like. I might add a texture to it.
Production: I drew the outline by hand, scanned it, tweaked the contrasts and now am laying out all the buildings in Flash (the pen tool is easier for me to use). For the gradients I'm just going back and forth between photoshop and flash with outlines and then importing a background image in flash.
It's still a WIP for sure. The buildings will be colored in, maybe adding some shading in the alleys to draw a distinction from the streets. That's for the ideas for the cemetery. I'll dabble with it and see what I come up with.
Stay tuned.
Excellent stuff. I agree with NeonKnight that the evocation of the Waterdeep style is very strong (in a good way); takes me back to FR1 in a heartbeat. I've always appreciated that style, and yours is looking to be a top-notch example of it.
Well, here is the latest. The buildings are coming slowly (argh! hand drawing!) but the largest area is almost done, which also contains the most small buildings (the slums). The other areas are smaller with larger buildings, so they should go quick.
I just went with white for the buildings to give them some contrast to the background. If I have time, I want to use a small palette of 3-4 colors for them. Any comments on the drop shadow? Keep it?
There is also a draft for the flooded abandoned docks/cemetery in the west.
Finally, I want to add ridges to the back side of the hills and perhaps some more elevation lives.
Any other comments would be greatly appreciated!
So far so good I say. Keep it up.
elevatioin lives .... oooooo what's that??? heh.
Looking good, and in this style of map, I personally wouldn't go with drop shadows..the buildings being so close together it might clutter it up too much. You might cut some time out of your day by using something like Illustrator or Inkscape... Xera also would probably work well to take some time off of use the pen too so much ... Photoshop has a pen tool as well, I find it works pretty good for something such as this... not quite as versatile as Illustrator, but it can get the job done...
awaiting the next wip