Good Tidings from Merry Old England!

[PapaBundy]

Hello!

I'm PapaBundy, a 20 year old student and wannabe author from Liverpool who's works of fiction would significantly benefit from the ability to be able to create maps for my always fictional settings. I stumbled across this site while trying to find tutorials and guides for basic map drawing and was impressed by some of the great works of art on display that some of the users have contributed. So I decided to throw myself in amongst the pigeons and see if I can use this fantastic site to the same degree of success as many others have before and hopefully many others will after me.

Now, for background I'm going to be nice and straight forward. I have absolutely zero prior experience of mapping. I have the hand drawing ability of a bag of stale doughnuts (but that's down to lack of practice as much as anything). I have no graphic design abilities nor would I even know where to start getting them. However, I believe that coming into this as a clean slate with a bunch of pro's means that I can easily correct any bad habits I may pick up and learn very quickly.

Aiming reasonably high, my objective is to supplement my works of fiction with relatively decent quality maps. The stuff I write is chiefly focused and set in a modern day, urban city setting and so competency in designing district and neighborhood maps and street maps for bustling metropolitan areas is the real goal here. However, internal floorplans and the like for key establishments in my work is also of importance.

I look forward to getting started and joining the community here and I hope one day to put up a piece of cartography worthy of some commendation.

[arsheesh]

Welcome to the Guild PapaBundy! Well there are some wonderful tutorials here that can help get you up to speed with regard to the how-tos of digital mapping. That being said, most of the city maps and all of the town map tutorials here are of a medieval fantasy variety, so you will have to modify them to suit your purposes. This will be challenging but also gives you a unique opportunity to contribute something novel to the community here. My advice would be to browse through the tutorials section and study all of the town maps there. Second, if you don't already have Google Earth, download it to your computer and use it to zoom in on various cities around the world. Studying these will give you a good feel for layout and architectural design from a birds-eye view. Finally, the best (and well, only) example I know of a modern city map done here was made by mearrin69. Here is a link to Mearrin's Tarina map. It might be too high of a target for you to shoot for just yet but it can serve as a source of inspiration. Hope that helps.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh