Originally Posted by
jbgibson
Sooooo - nice island you have going. Or a lake :-).
Yeah, one does not try Inkscape over The Gimp because it's simpler -- it isn't. Rather one picks one over the other to get a certain look. Sure, if you already *had* some chops with either type of graphics, that experience would weigh pretty heavily. Since you're new to both - start with your druthers, your gotta-haves, and your heroes. I got from your other posts (welcome by the way!) that your focus is supporting (or assisting?) material for two book/series worlds. By pandia I assume you mean pangia, not Jack Black's homeland? ;-) So - one (or one main) landmass. That does simplify things a bit.
But what do you want it to LOOK like? What do you need it to TELL? Are you okay with using a fair bit of randomness to make it just happen? Or is your writing so far along that you have a garzillion features and relationships between features that must exist? By far the easiest course is to do some random generation, stare at it, decide you like the geographical possibility here but could skip that bit, steer randomness to better match your growing vision, think some more, tweak, start over, tweak, randomize, and so forth. Accepting serendipity is a wonderfully freeing decision. Being willing to just chuck all or part and restart is great too. Deciding everything in your head in detail then carefully capturing it in ink or electrons is way harder for me - that's how one of my artist daughters rolls though - with the execution of a piece being more akin to a film capture than a constructed building.
Now it sounds as if you've drawn some stuff and didn't like it. Fair enough. You don't have to do all your randomness by manually wiggling lines around though. There's absolutely graphically delicious ways to take natural shapes (clouds, cracks, paint chips, and on and on) and generate pleasing landforms. And there's compute-intensive methods using fractals to do that from scratch - see things like ProFantasy's Fractal Terrains. You're not taking your muse and stuffing it in a sack in surrender, to use generated terrain, by the way. Most of the methods of randomly generating linework will let you tweak, combine, edit, or recycle. You can rummage through numerous Guild tutorials and see how people take clouds (real or synthetic) or other starting points and come up with pleasing worlds.
Which brings me right smack back to the real start place - what do you WANT? If this Pangia place needs a Tolkeinesque drawn chart, that's one thing. If it needs to look like the product of an in-story medieval cartographer or adventurer, that's another. If modern atlas styles toot your horn, that's a different set of tools and methods. Other than just generally getting some proficiency with a main tool (The Gimp, Inkscape, dip pens, whatever) there's no sense in practicing something you don't want to wind up like. Even your dystopian future has those questions - hand-drawn 5000 years into decline? Scribbled-upon copies of random 21st century real maps? Satellite views that are photographically real? Which? Or which oneS ?
There is a great resource for open source linework for the real world - look up OpenStreetMap. But you could start from that 'truth' as a guide and embellish and storytell to your heart's content.
Jon is exactly right above, re: apples vs. oranges. BUT.... stretching an analogy until it snaps as I am used to doing, one could say the apple and the orange are both roughly spherical shapes, whose characteristics mimic a world.... sorta. Peel either, and you instantly see the problem of trying to depict a spherical surface on a flat map - there's going to be some distortion. SO somewhere in your quest for a style & method, read up a bit on projections and what they do for you and to you. Different needs drive a real mapper to different projections - you can let that affect your work as much or as little as you like.
Can you tell I've done Requirements Analysis at work before, formally? The process of eliciting your own or some customer's needs is about the same. Ask a LOT of questions. Answer at length. Things like - okay, the maps are to support writing/storytelling... do they need to be of a size and detail level to fit on one or two pages in a typical paperback? Or will any publication include electronic views of any resolution you decide on? Or will no one see them but you? Monochrome or color? "Period" or modern in typography and style? Will cities need detailed street layouts, or are cities to be just dots on a world map? Will you need to show anything exotic - aetherial planes, deep caverns, alternate perspectives, alien palettes? Need roads & routes? Sea lanes? Winds, weather, biome data, or purely political? Or more photographic, with the viewer to get everything from color, shading, and landforms? Will you be showing distinctions between societies by the language (borrowed or constructed...) of the labeling, the fonts chosen, little vignettes, insets and pictorial icons? Or is this one-continent also one-people, one-language, one-culture? Do you want realism in your wind and waves, temps and flora, or do you just seek reasonable plausibility, or do you figure to sling dis-n-dat wherever it suits the story and realism be hanged? Or more rarely - do the surroundings not matter a whit to your story?
Lurching back to an original question about tools - do you grok the difference between vector and raster graphics, and what they can do for you? Vector is not suited for every style, but those that rely on linework a lot, and those that need to scale up and down smoothly -- those Vector Graphics excel at. Need randomness, fuzziness, irregularity, or a painterly vibe? That's more often a raster outcome. They can complement by the way - inkscape seems easier to me to lay out text along a curve, so I have built a map in a raster program (Serif PhotoPlus is my go-to tool - similar idea as Photoshop or Gimp) then exported a view of that as a guide to label in Inkscape. I then export just the labels and re-import that into PhotoPlus as one layer. Other linear features *might* easier be done with that kind of workflow. You can draw lines nicely in raster, it just loses something to edit, or else is difficult to edit, and certainly may not scale up or down gracefully. In a vector program a change of a border might be grabbing a few node handles, dragging this way and that, and maybe re-stroking the revised path with your pattern of choice.
So. Whatcha want? Whatcha like? Whatcha got time and patience to shoot for? Some of the work here at the Guild is fine art and master craftsmanship, not to mention distressingly quick. I can get results that please me at some fraction of that level of beauty in oodles more time, or I can settle for what I can hack together quickly. I don't do a whole lot with preexisting symbols, but lots of people do, with excellent results. And no matter where any Guildsperson is skill-wise, practice is going to improve the result. Are you willing to (or is it even possible to) take months to get a skillset and *then* tackle work for publication? Or is all you need serviceable representation of a world for your own use in fleshing out the settings of your stories?
Shop for one or more looks you like. Peruse the tutorials - even those not focused on an end product you want may teach useful techniques. Grab a pencil and scribble ideas. And take heart - every single one of us started at zero capability and worked up from there :-). Don't be timid about sharing your works in progress as you learn - I can learn something from a rank newbie's explorations, sometimes better than from ninja masters, so your offerings can give as well as take input. And if you've read much here you know it is an astoundingly helpful community, where know-how is spread instead of hoarded, as are praise and advice.
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