Introducing my portfolio
Hey, everybody! This looks like a forum for me.
I've been doodling maps in spare notebooks since just about whenever I read Redwall and Lord of the Rings in middle school. But exposure to wider fantasy materials, a little art training in college, some linguistics background, and some planetary geology courses in grad school have evolved my style quite a bit beyond those doodles!
I do all these maps with a dip pen and india ink, and many of them I paint with watercolor pencils afterward. I try to do as much by hand as possible. (My day job involves enough computers!) Sometimes I do things like...spill coffee on them on purpose. I often label the maps, though I'm not much of a calligrapher.
Here's one of my all-time favorites: a conception of a habitable extrasolar planet tidally locked to a red dwarf star. This is known as the "eyeball Earth" scenario, where the planet is encased in ice everywhere except a circular area right under the sun. I found that such a compelling idea, I postulated a couple reasonable geological processes to happen (volanism, true polar wander, etc) and crudely "simulated" a few epochs of them with layers in GIMP before transferring the whole thing to pen and ink.
I've got a small catalog of my maps on this web page, including links to more detailed write-ups about them. And I listed a few prints for sale here, though I haven't had much luck yet. Maybe a little more visibility will help.I've a wide range of images of these maps, in various stages of completion, in a Google+ album.
I'm extremely impressed by the maps I see on these forums. Many of them make me feel a bit inadequate. But I think I've converged on my own style. I'm curious what you all think, and eager to join the community!
Welcome to the forum Jshoer!
Some very nice maps you got there. Always warms my heart seeing someone working with traditional medium. Just wish you had a scanned version of them, especially the second one – the line work looks amazing!
Can't wait to see more from you.
Cheers,
Tainotim
Actually, maybe that's something I can ask about right away!
I've really struggled to find a good way to digitize these. The problems I tend to encounter are that scanners throw off the contrast, and my painting warps the paper significantly (which causes depth of field problems when photographing). I've had the best luck with a 60 mm macro lens that I rented for my Canon. That might have to become a permanent addition - though even then, the lighting is challenging.
Thanks for calling out the one you did - I really like that one. Lots of tiny lines.
Your city illustrations are really cool!
Last edited by jshoer; 02-21-2015 at 05:45 PM.
Thanks!
When I digitalize my maps I usually scan it in pieces (a3 and up), and then edit the parts together in Photoshop. After that, I adjust the levels to make the line-work stronger, and to remove the dim, grayness that often comes with the scan(I own a very cheap scanner). Sometimes I also multiply the image to make the line-work even stronger if necessary. That's a process I would recommend, if you own the software.
Oh, and, thanks for the link!
Welcome to the Guild, jshoer.
Those are some great maps, and, like tainotim, it is a pleasure to see some hand-drawn art. That second map really is fantastic (I love the way you did the trees).
As for scanning, you could try going to a copy-shop to have it commercially scanned. I doubt it would be very expensive. What size paper do you use for these maps?
I think your problems of scanning seem to originate from the watercolour stage. Would you be willing to give up that aspect, and either post B&W maps or colour digitally?
THW
Formerly TheHoarseWhisperer
Actually, I did one black-and-white map on commission and took it in to be scanned. What I found was that the scan came out with ridiculous contrast levels. Not only was any shading (I had some ink washes, in the style of this study), screwed up, but worse, any remnants of pencil construction lines punched out almost as much as the ink. It was a real disappointment.
I haven't tried scanning a watercolored map yet. I could try coloring digitally...honestly, I do what I think will be fun and interesting, and I like the watercolor pencil technique. I'm open to suggestions, but that's not going to stop me coloring one.
I'm glad you like the tiny trees. Those forests are fun, especially now that I've figured out to disperse different tree styles throughout to emphasize different climates!
Oh, size -- mostly these are 14x17", or one of those torn in half.
Okay, so, for comparison, here is the best image I got of that map with the SLR and 60mm lens. I know it doesn't capture the full detail, but part of that is just because I made a lot of really small features. I've thought about taking multiple images and stitching them together, but autostitch runs out of memory real fast doing that. Do you think a scan-based method would improve it?
...and here's a photograph - same method - of one of the watercolored maps. I think it came out well.
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