WIP - Archipelago

[tilt]

Hi Jeff,
looking really good there, but I'm a bit disapointed that I can't zoom in to check out the details - but great idea and nice art ... have some rep for your first upload

[jeffsheets]

Hi Jeff,
looking really good there, but I'm a bit disapointed that I can't zoom in to check out the details - but great idea and nice art ... have some rep for your first upload

Thanks! Actually, these images are just showing what tiny bit of progress I have, and this one, at 500 by 360 is just a small portion of what will be the final map, 6000 by 4800 pixels. So, in essence, this is as zoomed in as it's going to get. If it ever got printed, the full size map would be 20 inches by 16 inches, at 300 ppi. For reference, I'm drawing everything at 400% zoom with my beloved wacom tablet.

This update shows the basic coloration I'm starting with (though suggestions are welcome... and I want to give it a faded watercolor kind of look if anyone has a good way to do that), as well as a mangrove forest. As for scale... Each of the sea trees (the spiral things) can hold perhaps 5,000 people comfortably, including all of the internal flora and fauna that lives there. The floatstone islands, which currently look more like floating potatoes in my self-critical opinion, are rather large chunks of solid rock, all formed from the peaks of mountains and large hills that were torn from the ground when much of their composition became floatstone. Thus... the mangrove trees are exceptionally giant, perhaps not as big as the night elf starter zone in WoW, but still rather big. The coral pillars (there's a group of five on the east side of the archipelago) are about the smallest of the features, but particularly old ones reach half as high as the taller seatrees, so they're quite usable spots. The seaswamps are beds of vegetation growing on other submarine vegetation. One would not want to try to walk on it.