Touenkoku

[Naeddyr]

You seem to be going to a lot of trouble to make the rivers look freehand. Is there a reason you aren't doing them freehand?

There is such a thing as too much freehand. I don't have the skills and/or I don't have the patience to do tapering rivers by hand. But I don't want them to look too perfect.

Thanks for the comments, I'll keep them in mind. When I do the roughing up on a larger canvas, it should both look a bit smoother, but still have a good effect.

EDIT:



half-and-half image, left After, right Before.

One other reason why I do it this way is to get a workflow where I can go back and change things in the original vector (which is simple), and then just redo all the steps up that. It could even be scriptified.

Which I am considering doing now, thinking about adding islands to the south.

EDIT:

More

[Naeddyr]

Added those islands, went through all the junctions to smooth them out.

Added a couple of test labels, GIMP is not suitable, I'll do the rest in Inkscape.

I am not looking forward to naming everything. 1. it's hard to come up with something that isn't already used (Taoyuan=Touen is a city in Taiwan, for example), 2. man foreign languages with their writing system yknowhatimean 3. have to figure out the icons and stuff and also what terms to use for provinces and stuff, might go for dō/dao instead of shū etc.

One nice thing I've realised is that it's probably super simple to generate surnames for people by using all hanzi that refer to animals. Ma, Horse, is a real-life example. Then, Saiunkoku Monogatari style, colour terms, starting with the usual suspects.

The new city in the east is going to be the place where the East portal exists. I named it Fusangmen, Fusoumon, "Fusang-gate". Fusang is the mythical tree to the east of China upon which the ten Suns perch as they're waiting for their turn to light up the day (until nine were shot down by a mythical archer for staying in the sky with their brothers), and later Fusang became a placename for a mythical eastern land that became gradually associated with Japan or something close by.