WIP: Political maps on Zarmina

[jshoer]

I am finished! I'm satisfied with the artwork. Before posting this as a finished map I just want to work on the photography/scanning a little more and then write up the world for final presentation. (For instance, I think the red thingy in the border of the NP callout is just a reflection from my photo.) Here's the full view:



Some details of the callout regions:



For translation, here is the lexicon for the four languages of Zarmina. I've also invented a little signature sigil that I'm going to incorporate into all my maps from now on. It's based on the observatory from this map.

I have to say, even speaking as the artist, I just love the colors on this map. There is such rich variation in the plains of the AP callout - and I'm extremely happy with that, as that was the most difficult region to do. When I paint the final colors, if I leave too long for the paint to dry I'll end up with stark lines at the edges of the new paint. Wherever there are lines to paint up against, I can use them to break up my efforts, but that big open plain meant that I had to work fast while still spending enough time to properly blend the colors - and also keeping my brush from getting too much orange, green, or yellow on it when I moved to a region with another dominant color. Whew! In any case, I'm very pleased with how that came out. Hopefully, after I get a better image to upload, I can also share with you guys the wonderful contrasts of colors in the NP callout - I think the image above is merely okay.

All righty, I'm going to go off and write up some of the background material so I can post in the finished map forum later this weekend (or maybe later this week). Enjoy, everybody!

[jshoer]

Arg! The scan I got really does not capture the colors well at all. I made some attempt to colorize the scan from the photograph, but all I did was bog down GIMP endlessly. I don't think it's putting the swap file in the right place.

I'd like to try photographing it again to try and get better focus than you see above. I guess the "finished map" post will have to wait a bit longer than I planned...

[Diamond]

I love it. One of the most imaginative maps I've seen here. And I always like seeing how people go about constructing their conlangs.

Cool, man.

[jshoer]

All righty, sorry about that delay - the final map thread is here: http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...ad.php?t=32839

Thanks a bunch, Diamond. I took some phonetics classes, so my approach is phonetics-oriented: come up with a phoneme inventory and make words by jumbling those around - but syntax is kind of an afterthought. I try to give each language some kind of signature feature - all the languages of this world are missing liquids and approximants, and each one has individual features like being tonal or having affixes to denote various things.