Hi Redstar - and welcome to the Guild!
The colours work fine for me (it's a tried and tested colour combination) - did you make the map with CC3? I really do like the way you've depicted the buildings - it works well to the perceived scale of the drawing. It's a really convincing map. Presumably there are more buildings to come?
If shallow waters are to be an important part of the map, you could contours, but I'd suggest not having them outlined in black and maybe feathering them a bit.
The map is very evocative of the Waterdeep map for Forgotten Realms around the 90's. My only suggestion (and it's only a suggestion based on my preference) is to make the buildings a different color than the ground, to give it a little contrast.
Daniel the Neon Knight: Campaign Cartographer User
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Hi Redstar-
Thanks for joining up and showing us your work. I like the map colours, as well. As suggested, setting the building fill to something other than the ground would help them to stand out.
As to the cemetery - how about just drawing the usual items (crypts, large tombstones, paths, etc) then using water colours in the flooded areas? I might make it clearer, too, if you only make a portion of the cemetery flooded.
-Rob A>
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Thanks for the feedback everyone!
On colors: I actually color selected them directly from the Waterdeep City of Splendor book.I have a bad eye for colors, so I wanted to start with something that i perceived as looking good. I was worried the water looked a little too sky-like. I might add a texture to it.
Production: I drew the outline by hand, scanned it, tweaked the contrasts and now am laying out all the buildings in Flash (the pen tool is easier for me to use). For the gradients I'm just going back and forth between photoshop and flash with outlines and then importing a background image in flash.
It's still a WIP for sure. The buildings will be colored in, maybe adding some shading in the alleys to draw a distinction from the streets. That's for the ideas for the cemetery. I'll dabble with it and see what I come up with.
Stay tuned.
Excellent stuff. I agree with NeonKnight that the evocation of the Waterdeep style is very strong (in a good way); takes me back to FR1 in a heartbeat. I've always appreciated that style, and yours is looking to be a top-notch example of it.
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