[Comission] As yet unnamed novel map

[RobA]

Continuing to meet the demands of fledgling fantasy novelists the world over, this is a recent "commission-in-progress".



...Did I mention how much work hand drawn mountains are?

this was a first go at the dithering, and I think it is a bit heavy - I'll lighten it up in the main land and decrease the patterning in the desert areas. I'm happy about how depicting the roads using negative space turned out.

The font is mostly Fiorenza II except the 'e' was too hard to read, imoo, so it took a quick trip through fontforge...

I'll still be enlarging the fonts slightly to improve legibility at the 300dpi printed size, as well as adding additional labeling, decorative border, compass, scale, etc...

Right now the city icons represent size, but I;ve been asked to make them all the same so that, too will change.

I'm also really tempted to leave the oceans blank... I like the contrast...

Looking for suggestion/critique, as always..

-Rob A>

[tilt]

very nice RobA, was about to say something about a drop-down-shadow look in the north-west, but it disappeared when I zoomed in ... personally I'm not a big fan of the pointillism of your shading, but overall it looks good

[jfrazierjr]

Not quite sure the mountains all match the same perspective.... mainly, Darkmoon spire looks a bit flatter tthan the others.... I do dig the overall thing....Is this going to be B/W or color?

[RecklessEnthusiasm]

Oh emm gee, this is lovely! No real crits here, just impressed and jealous sighs.

[Larb]

Does dithering refer to how you do shading with all the little dots? And regarding that, how would you reproduce that kind of shading in photoshop (assuming it wasn't too difficult to do?). It's a really nice effect.

Oh and it looks really really nice btw. =P

[RobA]

very nice RobA, was about to say something about a drop-down-shadow look in the north-west, but it disappeared when I zoomed in ... personally I'm not a big fan of the pointillism of your shading, but overall it looks good

Thanks - that style of shading was specifically asked for by the requester. As it is to be printed in B&W, and at 300DPI, it seems to work... I just need to play with the density a bit...

Not quite sure the mountains all match the same perspective.... mainly, Darkmoon spire looks a bit flatter tthan the others.... I do dig the overall thing....Is this going to be B/W or color?

This latest version pretty much hides Darkmoon Spire behind the label - Gonna have to fix that. Not sure what you mean though, it seems the same to me, but I've been staring at this map for ~14 hours now...

Oh emm gee, this is lovely! No real crits here, just impressed and jealous sighs.

You? I'm usually jealous of your work - your recent hand drawn style is da-bomb! But thanks!

Does dithering refer to how you do shading with all the little dots? And regarding that, how would you reproduce that kind of shading in photoshop (assuming it wasn't too difficult to do?). It's a really nice effect.

Oh and it looks really really nice btw. =P

Dithering is the shading with dots. Not sure about photoshop - maybe someone can translate.... I just painted greyscale shading in multiple layers (mountain shading, derest, roads, desert, land outline, etc) all in multiply mode then did a New from visible of just he shading, and moved that layer to a new image. I converted that new image to an indexed image 1-bit using the default dithering gimp does, then brought the dithered layer back in (mode set to multiple) and hid all the other shading layers.

I honestly wan't sure if it would work, but it beats drawing dots by hand. I'm still most likely going to apply a displacement filter on the dither layer to break up some of the regularity.

Here is the latest with most of the labeling done:


-Rob A>

[tilt]

neat trick with the index color

[Lukc]

Looks nice ... though I'm not 100% the rivers and mountains completely match the dithering ... anyway, back to hand-stippling for the hand-drawn competition

[jfrazierjr]

This latest version pretty much hides Darkmoon Spire behind the label - Gonna have to fix that. Not sure what you mean though, it seems the same to me, but I've been staring at this map for ~14 hours now...

Yea, I was debating on posting that comment as I could not decide if the label was throwing off my brain's perception of the mountains or not, but I figured I would throw it out there just in case for your "review". Going to have to try that dithering thing...makes for nice deserts I would think...

[RobA]

Looks nice ... though I'm not 100% the rivers and mountains completely match the dithering ... anyway, back to hand-stippling for the hand-drawn competition

That's what the displacement filter will take care of (I hope)

-Rob A>