Looking good
With that human city icon you filled in, you might try scraping the top layer of pigment-infused paper off (very gently) with an exacto knife or similar sharp pointy object.
The last post seemed to bug out with the latest WIP tag, so I'll post it separate here. =)
### LATEST WIP ###
Ah, I had not thought of actually removing the offending part by force. I'll try that when I get home and continue painting. Planning on buying some more supplies as well. This place has now officially started to scrounge into my wallet.
Try it on a scrap piece first to see how it affects the paper and paint (leave it to dry first). And if you're attempting to take ink off, vs watercolor paint... (I did this the other day where I had filled in a lake that I thought was a river) the black ink from the scrapings smudged into the surrounding paper and dirtied it... next time I'll try using a piece of tape to lift the scrapings off instead of blowing and brushing them.
Of course, the best thing to do would be to not make such mistakes in the first place, but we're human--so little fixes like this can be useful on occasion.
Chashio: I bought a thick white color today, and I'm pondering if I should just fill in all the human cities with a white dot in the middle, which possibly would make them look better as well. I am kinda annoyed with them right now.
The idea of using tape is really clever though, unless you could just blow it off?
In other news, one of our cats managed to sit on the map, get frightened by me when I saw it, take of, sending the paper and the little bowl of green color mix flying. And at the same time managing not to get one drop of paint on the map. O_o
I felt like a jerk getting angry at the cat as well, since I always tolerated them on the table unless we were sitting by the table, and now he looks at me with really big eyes, mournfully. I'll make it up to him, and not leave my important papers on the table like that. =)
Today I only just managed to do the swamps, which was a big part of the map. I experimented by putting reeds along the little ponds I made earlier with a calligraphy pen with a nib, as well as loads of stray grasses inbetween, but it didint feel right, so I skipped the grasses. After some deliberation I used a larger brush which I dipped into the color, then the water, and finally dried off slightly, and just drew it inbetween the ponds in slightly wavy motions. The color/paint/wetness ratio differed all the time, which gave it all a nice natural feel.
Forests are next, which is gonna be a pain, and I'll need to experiment on the glaciers. However, now that I have two white paints, one that can cover stuff and another which I can easily use for mixing, I am feeling more confident that I can get a good icy blue feel for the glaciers.
Here I have just started to put the reeds along the ponds using my nib pen.
My piece of scrap paper which I tested out stuff on. I tried doing the squiggly lines with the nib, but decided against it in the end and used a brush with more watered down paint instead, but you get the idea. I have not dared to put trees there yet, which I should, at least for the swamps, the marches being more just ponds and reeds. However, I am feeling the time pressure and so I am leaving the trees out. For now.
I could prolly sit and do these swamps forever, but I want to have all the features in by voting time, and as such I am leaving some stuff for later. I will probably continue working on it even after the competition though. I am growing rather fond of this swampy, messy world, and I see no problem with using it for my own roleplaying games later on.
Last edited by Khamero; 04-22-2013 at 03:57 PM.
Again, it seems like it mistakes the Latest wip pictures with others on the same post, so I am reposting the wip pic here. =)
### LATEST WIP ###
Last stretch for the challenge right now. One workday left (and by that I mean one weekend day where I can work on the map.
I try to explain how I work and my designchoices as well as I can.
So here phase one of the most tedious part of the painting. Conifer forests. I used a pretty sharp nib and my green ink straight out of the bottle, no mixing or anything. The variation in backgroundcolor will have to give it life. I just use standard calligraphy ink, I dont know if there is specific ink which work differently on the paper or something, but this stuff works.
More conifer forests.
The return of the conifer forests.
I know which forest you were in last summer. o_o
By now I am pretty tired, but happy. I drew all the trees, starting by the bottom of the forest areas and working upwards. When I was finished with all the green stuff I added the trunks that would be visible. Pinetrees are pretty dense, so I just have to do the ones in front.
Here comes a bigger problem, the broadleaf trees. You -can- do them by drawing little cottonballs and just leave it at that, but its tedious and looks like <expletive>, as opposed to the pinetrees, which are tedious but look pretty OK.
Finally I come up with a master plan! I can just stamp them using some kind of spongy thing. My mind starts working! I dont have any pro tools for it, so I'll have to improvise.
First plan consisted of using spare little cylinders of leather which you get when you punch holes in leather. Those would be a good size, but I realize after a while that they´d be too small to dip in paint and then stamp repeatedly. But the leather is a good material, soft and spongy and with a nice texture, soooo...
If I take a piece of soft, thin leather and drape it tightly over a pencils head, then you´d have a small tip which should work. You´d have to secure the leather with glue and/or tape or something though.
I ponder this, and my girlfriend gives me what can best be described as a admiring look over my extremly complicated work.
I realize that the leather is too thick, and begin thinking up an even more elaborate and impressive plan to make the tiny little stamp when I suddenly stop, think about what I am doing, and abandoning all hope of impressing my SO with my intricate designs, and fetch a Q-tip instead.
Worked like a charm.
Picture shows the q-tip in question, as well as my scrap paper, where I tried out the swamp colors when I extended the swamps again.
Push it down hard and you get a nice very green circle. If you put the q-tip almost laying down and roll it to get an edge and then bop it slightly against the scrap paper to get it slightly flat, you can get the nice little spongy blotches as shown in the upper part of the paper. Complete with treetrunks, and you have a forest.
My leaf-forests are slightly less dense than my conifer forests, but I kind of prefer it like that, as opposed to just blocks of forests with equal density.
In hindsight, I could have varied the forest densities alot more.
The forests in question. Working at the sofa at the moment. I am trying to vary my drawing positions as much as I can to relieve the stress on my back for example. Varied workpositions are always good. =)
I also started drawing the mountains. I -should- have done them before the forests. But at least my hindsight is 20/20, and it didint look too bad. I used a larger nib for the mountains, and pretty thick black ink which makes it stand out more, which I like. I still feel inexperienced with making mountains, but there are a few decent ones here.
More mountains.
A closeup. I decided to add trunks to all leaf-trees that were not concealed by other trees. That gave the forests more life, I feel.
I could easily have used different shades of green and so on with different q-tips to make it more varied as well, but I didint think of it then. I will in the future though. Q-tips 4 lyfe.
I post no real WIP right now, I'll post a final scan tomorrow I think.
Future: Glaciers. I dont wanna, but I gotta. As well as adding the shrub/badland/savannah, possibly recoloring the goblin towers purple as well as maybe adding evil details the the NW grasslands, which is an evil area ingame, which is prolly why the humans never settled there. I cant do that with the only good area I have, since its a dense conifer forest, and the colors just would not match. You could assume that its good, since there are elves there, but DF elves are cannibals (Yep, no kidding.), so maybe not.
FInal map
Chashio: Thanks.
Today was the small fix day, which took alot of time, but added those little details that make it... well, good.
Step one: I finally dared to go out on a date with the dreaded glaciers. I spent hours playing around with different mixtures of the paint I used, basically titanium dioxide in a tub. Stuff like if the brush should be dry, should it be wet, should I mix in some blue, and so on and so fourth. In the end, I used a semi wet brush just to make the edge of the glacier, or the glacial cliffside. I then tried different methods of lightly brushing with a pretty dry brush just to leave some blue with white, simulating snowdrifts covering blue ice. It didint look as good as it could have, the material of the paper was a little bit too rough to give it a smooth, snowy surface, among other things, so in the end I just brushed it all with white.
Here I have started to set out the names of places. Since I am only using red paint and a nib, I could not write down citynames, especially not in the forests. I could have used my white to cover it up and give me space to write, but time was a constraint, and more importantly, I dont think it would have looked very good. So I decided instead to just put down the region names. The forest names are written next to the forests, either in the swamplands or the water, where they are readable at least. I am a bit sad that it can be confusing as to if the name refers to the body of water or the forest, but I really wanted names to have a way of navigating the world, so I added them. I will probably continue work on this map and name the waters as well, which should clear it up a bit, but that is for the future.
And here is the finished piece. Or at least the piece which I will be judged on in the challenge.
Many small changed, which might be hard to see, but all the badlands have a dry-hilly texture now, and the savannahs have golden grass, and the evil area in the top (Fafodefafirelèma) has gotten purple grass, signifying how sinister it is. I left the elfs forest as it was.
I also painted the human cities with a white dot in the middle, which in my view made them look much better.
The glaciers still looked bad, so I added a black border as well, and finally added the black lines, or cracks and crevases in the surface, which gave it more of a cliff face feel.
I debated if I should have added a cliff edge on the top of the lines as well, but decided against it. The glaciers are basically part of the arctic, and I didint want to spend too much time there, as its not a very intresting place, map-wise. (It's an awesome challenge to build a fortress out there though. It's Fun.)
In the end, I scanned the map in two pieces with my scanner, cussed it out a bit since they didint line up properly, and then cussed some more when I finally got them to line up, and the top part was a bit blurry from the scan and the lower part was sharp. Trick was to let one part overlap the other and have them on different layers. Then you just use a soft eraser and erase the blurry parts til it looks good. I did a sloppy job on my own map, but I gotta get up to work tomorrow as well, so I'll have to live with it for now.
As a summary, I made this map because I like to work with my hands, and I have realized more and more, how I like to learn the actual handiwork of it all, and how tecniques can be used to make an otherwise impossible task possible. Winning this challenge or now, I've learned loads, both practical stuff (q-tips!) and more intangiable things, as how a single idea can change a task fundamentally.
I find manual mapmaking the most intresting due to the mistakes that make it into the end product, and you have little to no chance to redo stuff, so many times you have to accept and/or work around your mistakes. The goblin towers were too dark of a green? Well, they´re black goblin towers now! (which kinda fits since they are often built of obsidian if I recall correctly) Did you regret using map symbols from the game instead of little pictures of villages and stuff? Tough luck, you gotta roll with it now! (I actually ended up regretting that for visual reasons, but I am unsure if I whould have had the time to finish the project had I done it any other way).
In the end, I gotta agree with what nolgroth said in his thread for his map: I win. Even if I dont get the most votes, I win purely by completing a sometimes literally backbreaking project. And learning from it.
Last edited by Khamero; 04-28-2013 at 04:24 PM.
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