[WIP] As Yet Untitled World
Having been out of work and bored, I decided to have another go at my old mapping attempt. Having always been stymied by the more "traditional fantasy" artistic style, I decided to go with more of a political map look. I am a graphic designer by trade rather than an artist to begin with, and for the purposes of my novel the political things are much more important than the geographic features. I may at some point try to figure out a simple way to represent the mountain ranges on the map, but it will be exactly that: simple. Any ideas on how to accomplish this would be much appreciated
Much of my inspiration for this style came from this map, as well as my history with mapmaking for modern setting cooperative worldbuilding. All of the techniques I've used in building the start of this map are my own experimentation over a late night last night excepting the text, for which I borrowed the ink bleeding technique from Gidde's Hand-drawn Maps for the Artistically Challenged tutorial. If anyone was interested, the tools of my trade are GIMP, a Wacom Bamboo tablet, and Adobe Fireworks for the text, because I feel it does a much better job than GIMP with curved text. The font is Imperator by Paul Lloyd, acquired from dafont.com
Since I haven't (re)named the world yet, I did not yet bother to create a legend. Solid black lines are rivers. Dotted black lines are sovereign state borders. City names in small caps are capital cities/city-states and lowercase city names are subject cities. The main continent (not counting the unexplored lands to the south) is somewhere in area between South America and North America. The Empire of Athanon is roughly equal in area to the Macedonian Empire at its height. The Kingdom of the South, the red which I forgot to label, is about equal to the Qin Dynasty of China. I didn't bother to calculate the areas of the other states yet.
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