The Brightland Kingdom

[George Marques]

This is a map I mad for my last year's NaNoWriMo fantasy novel: The Orb of Shadiny. Here it is, the Brightland Kingdom, with three maps for labeling different things:



It started as a base map for reference and I ended up putting on some finishing touches. It'll change, though, as I want to add some roads and make a more accurate scale (which I never really thought much about). This will happen when I stop to revise the novel and be sure of this stuff.

I did this in GIMP using the following tutorials:

• Fast and Easy Artistic Maps in the GIMP by darklingrisen
• Making Map Borders in GIMP by arsheesh
• Creating old, weathered paper using the Gimp by RobA

Also, credits for two grunge brush sets:

• http://akisu-sama.deviantart.com/art...ack-2-13556205 by Justin Williams "aksiu-sama"
• http://ascariosa.deviantart.com/art/...-Gimp-98302182 by Anna "ascariosa"

[foremost]

Hi George.

Glad to here you were able to write a novel for last year's NaNoWriMo! Now you'll enjoy making some maps for it.

First thing I noted was that the three maps are of the same place. I can see that you did this to give yourself more space for labeling. My suggestion would be to reduce the size of your labels a little bit, and try to simplify them if at all possible. This might make it doable to include all of the important labels on one map. If you don't think that would work, you might consider doing a different type of map for each labeling version.

Seems like you've got a lot of places : ) Are all of these included in your novel?

You might also revisit some of the city icons. I think I had seen some tutorials for them here on the forums before.
Best of luck, and thanks for sharing.
-foremost

[George Marques]

Thanks for the tips, foremost.

I'll look for tutorials about the icons. I'm far from being a designer and I drew all of them with the mouse. I should polish them more.

About the labels, it's quite a PITA to make them in GIMP, at least the curved ones. It'd be better if I use another to do that (maybe Inkscape could do the trick).

Answering the question, not all of the places are visited in the novel, but most of them are. Just a few are not even mentioned.