WIP - Tirwen

[waverlyt]

Tirwen is a campaign world I've been working on since December 2007; I've been working with the map, a little at a time, since April 2008.

I started with AutoREALM to make the outline of the continent and islands using its fractal line tools. Once I had what I wanted, I printed it, went over the lines with a medium tip Sharpie, and then scanned that as a black and white bitmap, which I then imported it into Inkscape. Inkscape was used to thin the lines a bit, fiddle with a few areas (having all of it as a vector graphic made this easy), and smooth everything out.

Once I had my outline done I rasterized it in Inkscape, grabbed Paint.net, and set to work on the basic color palette I wanted. When I started, I wan't planning on something as complicated as what this turned out to be. I quickly found that Paint.net couldn't do everything I wanted to do and switched over briefly to GIMP and then to Photoshop CS3.

Looking back, that all seems like a lot of unnecessary work.

Fonts used are Ale and Wenches BB for everything except for the runes in the corners and the non-numeral text under the distance scale, Viner Hand ITC for the numbers under the distance scale, and WizardSpeak for the runes in the corners. Ale and Wenches BB and WizardSpeak are from blambot.com.

Critiques would be greatly appreciated, since I'm really enjoying this and want to get better. The rivers, in particular, are frustrating me.

Thanks!