May 2012 Entry: Lost Dwarven Civilization

[Gidde]

Are those the March Upcountry (etc.) ones? I really liked those; I actually read those in text. Unfortunately the narrator for his Honor Harrington books is godawful.

Color is looking good!

[Jaxilon]

Yep, those are the ones. I'm sorry to hear about the Honor Harrington narrator. I read a bunch of those books and they were great.

Thanks for the encouragement too

[Jaxilon]

I may have to use a camera to try and capture this thing. For some reason a lot of my colorwash is not showing up It's rather irritating because the original does look better than what I am getting scanned in.

Anyway, more coloring done...I am really running out of time. I need to get this thing formatted and locked in. It would be easy if we weren't trying to do this all sans digital.

### Latest WIP ###

[flocko]

I like your colors. That border really makes them feel like tunnels. I wish you luck finding the right scan settings. I can tell there's a lot of color missing in the interior of the mountain.

[Jaxilon]

Thanks flocko. My wife is kicking my butt on this one because she thinks it's lacking my usual pop factor. She said it's kind of "flat" looking. I've been working on that and I think it's getting a bit better but sheesh. I finally took her to the internet and showed her a bunch of maps depicting underground tunnels and we realized she's just not that into the underground stuff. So I'm thinking, hey, maybe there's something to be discovered here only I haven't quite hit yet. We'll see. The important part is I'm learning and trying out a bunch of new things on this.

I can't wait to share the additions I have made but I've got to wait until I see if I can pull it off or not.

[arsheesh]

Looking good Jax. I particularly like your cliffs.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

[Jaxilon]

Well, it's too big for my scanner now but I have taken a picture using my wife's phone which didn't come out all that well. It's a new phone so not sure if we are using it correctly. It's just not coming out very clear. I had to shrink the image down or it was just too blurry. I have included some close ups of the various additions. Also, my wife has access to a large bed scanner at her work so we will go by at some point and scan the whole thing in which will be nice to finally get a decent scan.

I think I've caught a new bug though because now I want to do more watercolors. I went and picked up a pad and some decent brushes so we'll see how it goes. I learned a lot just doing the little illustrations for this map.

[Gidde]

They're addictive, aren't they? I picked up the bug about a year ago and have been fiddling with them ever since!

The new additions look great, Jax.

[Jaxilon]

Whew...
Even the scanner at my wife's work wasn't big enough..almost but not quite and I had to create two images and line them up which was a pain because they just weren't quite straight but I finally got the rotation down.

I had to copy paste the black margins on the sides from the bottom because during scanning I lost the edges. Nothing was modified in the artwork itself.

### Latest WIP ###

[Gidde]

I had to do the same thing, because my scanner at work was big enough, but CRAPPY. It kept auto-contrasting all of the detail out of the thing no matter what I did.