WIP - The World of Ascadia

[Gamerprinter]

It really depends. For most books, B/W without grayscale is what you can expect - in order to keep the price down.

However, an illustrated book (coffee table book, book of maps, etc.) full color and grayscale and be easily printed, but these books as substantially more cost to print.

If you're talking about typical fantasy literature that comes in hardback then to paper back, B/W is all you can expect.

Compare this to full color magazines. You'd think the cover price of $3 to $5 covers the cost of printing. This is not true. Most full color magazines cost $10 - $20 to print each. The advertising placed inside the magazine actually pays for the printing cost. The cover price only helps defray the cost of distribution. Full color printing for books are very, very expensive. Print-on-demand is essentially printing full color with a color copier/printer for short run, costs are still high, but actually not as high as if they were printed on offset printers for large distribution.

GP

[RobA]

Thanks GP. The indication is it will be a typical fantasy hardcover, so B&W offset.
Size was passed on to me as:

Final print size will (hopefully) be standard hardcover, which is 15cm x 22cm pages, so with margins, we are looking at roughly 13x20 cm (roughly 5"x8")

What would you suggest the resolution of the image be for good B&W printing? My current image is sitting at 200dpi.

-Rob A>

[RobA]

OK - I need suggestions!

I have tried a whole bunch of mountain styles, but nothing that I am happy with, that portrays the sense of scale, and fits with the clean land/river style.

This continent is about the size of Australia. Here is a rough comparison based on the information I have:



Any suggestion on how to represent the mountain ranges - again, using B&W only, would be helpful.

Thanks,
-Rob A>

[SeerBlue]

don't know if this will help, but for Raith of the FHCO we use 2 layers in Photoshop, bottom one black, top one white. He sketches in the shape of his mt chains in black on the white layer, and then uses one of the natural brushes in PS to erase the white from the white layer where he wants black. A pic is below. Don't know if this way is any better than just applying black to the white, but he gets better results this way. Don't know either if you can erase with vectors/whatever in this manner in ikscape.
SeerBlue and Raith Eliathy

[Badger]

OK - I need suggestions!

I have tried a whole bunch of mountain styles, but nothing that I am happy with, that portrays the sense of scale, and fits with the clean land/river style.

This continent is about the size of Australia. Here is a rough comparison based on the information I have:

Any suggestion on how to represent the mountain ranges - again, using B&W only, would be helpful.

Thanks,
-Rob A>

Here some ideas .... just thought I'd throw something up there for you .... was quick and dirty ... but you get the gist

[RobA]

Thanks for the suggestions.

I finally decided to go with something relatively easy to do in Inkscape, using the calligraphy brush. Somewhat symbolic, old school fantasy map...



I still have to add hills, etc and some additional terrain, but this seems to do it without being too cluttered.

-Rob A>

[Steel General]

Lookin' good Rob, great job!

[RobA]

I have decided to take this in a different direction. Things are getting too unwieldy in Inkscape so I have switched over to Gimp.

Here is a (1/2 size) of where I am, with a different mountain and hill style (The water effect is just a placeholder and will be replaced with something more hand-drawn, eventually):


Where I am stuck now is the circled area. The description I am working with is:

Frontier Area:
"with its massive canyons and rocky formations, is rough terrain. Think Grand Canyon/Mesa/Badlands with scattered woods and Texas-like prairie/desert."

I have come up with the following:


but am not 100% sold on it, so suggestions would be appreciated...

Thanks,

-Rob A>