Thanks! More city lovin' coming. Didn't get much time to work on it today, but still coming along.
Yup, cities good!
My Battlemaps Gallery http://www.cartographersguild.com/al...p?albumid=3407
Thanks! More city lovin' coming. Didn't get much time to work on it today, but still coming along.
Another update! Still work to do on the terrain and forests. Not completely satisfied with the overall color either, I'll probably have to do some color correction or something in the end.
### Latest WIP ###
I like the cities too. I really dislike the colors which are clashing and too loud to my eye.
The colors have the following problems....
1. All are too bright, too saturated, see if you can make them greyer with desaturation or darker colors.
2. The boundaries between colors is too abrupt. Lines like that don't occur in nature. Try to blend the boundaries together, either with some shading of one color into the other, or with some kind of natural boundary like hills, rivers, etc.
3. The colors are too uniform. Overlay some texture on each of the colors to break up the monotony. Something bumpy on the forests, something like grass texture on the grasslands, or even just cloudy texture that makes areas that are slightly shaded darker or lighter within each color.
Goombac, something I struggle with in my own maps (1 so far, but yeah...) is labeling. Checking your map I saw there're some labels where you can't really discern what it is.
For example...
...Micra...thene (I believe?) is lining with the mountain shading...did you try putting it above the city? Or maybe just a bit lower from where it is?
...Surnia... might be...also needs some effort to discern...
...Strixaria...I believe would look better above the city, taking a bit of the forest...
---Virginus...might look better under the city...
---Occitali...also somewhat hard to read...
What I tried doing in my map was a soft erase under the names, soflty removing some of the drawing under the names to better detract the label.
I mean...it's something I struggle myself, so take what I say with a grain ^_^
About the labeling, I'm not going to make it more visible until I'm done with the black lines, just because of how I do it, I want to make sure that the labels are where I want them to be before I go and make it so that the black doesn't touch the names. So don't worry about that one I have it all under control, it's just a matter of doing it closer to the end.
As with the colors, like I said I'm going to do some sort of color correction at the end to try and make the colors more uniform and not stick out as much, and I'm not done with the detailing on the terrain. Once I have the forests and stuff done I plan on continuing with the grass similar to how it is near Tytan and Glaucira, and make all of the mountains closer to what it is on the northern parts of the map where the mountains blend slightly into the grass. But yeah, I'm not going for realism here, just something that looks pleasing, which I can hopefully get closer to once I'm done with the line work and detailing.
And I haven't touched the entire southern portion of the map yet with the really green forest blobs, so don't look at those yet
As for the textures, I've been considering adding some texture to the water, but other than using the black brush (and maybe painting it a different color instead) I have no plans to add further texture to the land, it's not really what I'm going for here. Although I do plan to go over a bunch of stuff with a multiply brush once it's closer to completion to give it more dimension. And depending on how it looks once I have the detailing done and how much time is left I might add some non-labelled villages here and there to break up the colors some more.
Thanks for the replies, stick around and hopefully it'll come together down the road.
Here it is for now. I have plans tonight, so I'm not sure how much more I'm going to be able to do before the contest closes, if I can do anything at all. Regardless, I'm planning on working on this further after the contest is over just to get it how I want.
### Latest WIP ###
Here's the final for now, although I do plan on continuing eventually just for my own good.
### Latest WIP ###
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