Temple Street to the Grand Temple - a hand-drawn map fragment

[kestrelgrey]

Cool! looks good. The shapes are really evocative and suggest some great buildings, and seeing just the front of the Grand Temple really makes me want to know/see more. Your lines are really clean (especially for being hand drawn in ink!), and the added color looks really good. The border threw me off a little, but it's just a WIP ^-^
Just curious, but was this city planned at all, or is this area wealthier? There are quite a few wide streets that are quite regular, which is quite different from the little "snippet" streets and alleys in between the "lot" shapes.

[Wirelizard]

Cool! looks good. The shapes are really evocative and suggest some great buildings, and seeing just the front of the Grand Temple really makes me want to know/see more. Your lines are really clean (especially for being hand drawn in ink!), and the added color looks really good. The border threw me off a little, but it's just a WIP ^-^

Thanks! I'm actually not sure what to do with the border, to be honest. I added buildings until I ran out of paper, basically, and adding a computer-made border that works with hand-drawn building shapes in a satisfactory way is still eluding me.

Just curious, but was this city planned at all, or is this area wealthier? There are quite a few wide streets that are quite regular, which is quite different from the little "snippet" streets and alleys in between the "lot" shapes.

I figure Temple was rammed through an existing organic streetplan to connect the two squares/plazas, so the buildings immediately along it are well-off and newer but immediately behind them are older buildings - and many of the wide streets off Temple are the remains of older courts & yards.

I've started adding lettering and such to this. I fired a PNG version of the GIMP file into Inkscape, did all the lettering on one layer there, then exported a PNG with just the lettering on it back to GIMP and pasted it as a new layer in the XCF image file. Inkscape's font handling, kerning and text-to-path tools are frankly much easier to use than GIMP's, although GIMP 2.8 is improved over the older 2.6.x versions.

The compass rose is also an Inkscape creation; I actually used elements of the handwriting font to create the compass lines, so they look like they came from the same pen. I used the same export/paste as layer trick as the text, then scaled and rotated the layer to fit.



Still not sure what this needs to finish it - a title somewhere, I suppose, and I really have no idea about borders for the thing. Suggestions, inspiration or bright ideas welcome!