August/September 2014 Lite Challenge: Deverin Isles
For the last month or so, I've been hanging out on here quite a bit. I've been looking through a lot of old maps, in the gallery, in the challenge archives, and so on, just getting an idea of what I like the best.
There are certainly some among you who really stand out in skills and artistry, and there are so many different styles, even for the same type of map.
Then there are are so many types of maps, dungeons to inns to castles, villages to entire worlds, and some that don't fit any category easily.
I feel like an ancient art apprentice studying the masters, the kind that began by copying their master's work, to gain skill and eventually to develop a style of their own. It seems like that's what I've been doing.
This blob challenge appeared easy at first, and I dashed off a map, trying to use some of the mapping symbols to make forests, towns, roads, etc. That is in the thread "Blobland".
But as I continued to look through older maps on here, I got more and more interested in trying out some of the things I saw.
So I have started over again with this challenge, and this time, I'm trying to emulate the styles of some things I've seen in maps I found attractive. There are so many choices of map level, small local (caverns, for example) to global, and of art techniques (atlas or CC3, for example), and of realism or symbolism, it may take me years to try out most of them.
To make this long story a little shorter, I decided to try a bunch of them. The result is this map, containing a larger, more global, view of the lands, an underground cavern, a village, an interior of rooms, and a wilderness spot for fun.
It was a really fun project. Comments, critiques, suggestions are always very welcome.
I just hope there's no rule against one person submitting two different maps to a single challenge. (Three in fact, since the mines are also "the blob".
Cheers,
Cornelia
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