FInal map
Chashio: Thanks.Was confused about what repping meant for a bit, but I think I figured it out. I felt pretty awesome about the q-tips as well. ;D
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.
