Quote Originally Posted by kestrelgrey View Post
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.

Click image for larger version. 

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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!