Thankyou for your comments Iggy. I stepped back and took a look at various different maps and novels and really focus on geography which is one of my weaker skills and I scrapped everything I had and began to redraw the map from scratch.
Vandia use to be a supercontinent, a massive landmass the the width of east Russia to the British Isles and perhaps the height of the top of Canada to the bottom of South America. Huge, you see. I decided my world isn't that big, it does contain other continents and such but Vandia itself is the size of Australia. So I got out the digital equivalent of a fresh sheet of paper, and I started from scratch and now the world looks like this.
The land is much better in my opinion. Avesa to the west is two hours behind Holoron in time, though time keeping is a relatively new concept in Vandia. Instead of being called the Greater World of Vandia, it is now simply the Six Nations of Vandia. Vandia itself is a temperate climate, Nebanris has a cooler climate due to volcanic activity, and Holoron is mostly barren on the surface. I'm slowly learning things as I go along, I am doing a lot of research on cartography and geography, as well as other research on basic narrative writing and linguistics, because Vandia has a form of alphabet that is simlar to English but looks different and etc.
This map is the zoomed out version that will only show major locations such as capital cities and importan features like the volcanoes of Nebanris. There will be other maps that will zoom in on the nations and show various state borders and major cities and important locations in the actual nations as opposed to the overall map. The map for Holoron is going to be very interesting indeed and will probably be difficult to map. I also might map very important buildings like the academy and the capital city assembly hall or Braydeos. Long story short (hehe) Radiant Sky is a grand epic and it will probably require a lot of maps.
Some things I am discussing for this map or will include later are:
- Forests: I don't know if I should show forests on this large map or not. This map won't have colour in the final version because its for a book, and all attempts at me to draw forests have come up rather crap. I could draw them in the zoomed in version of the maps and exclude them from this one. Any thoughts?
- Islands: What you see isn't really all of the landmass but it is a general estimate, smaller islands will be added some places and some might even have names.
- Symbols: Symbols for the nations MAY be included or they may not. Braydeon states each have a representative animal that is part of their symbol
and the royal emblem is a tree, these may be on the zoomed in map.
Any questions you can ask me that may help me to think more about the map making process will be very helpful and much appreciated. Thanks.
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