Tarnswood - a beginner's attempt

[loottheroom]

I've been keeping a campaign journal of my D&D game over at my site, and every week with the journal I've been posting maps of the dungeons and locations my players are exploring. This is the first week of the journal that hasn't featured a dungeon style adventure, so I decided to draw up a map of the small town that served as the basis for the early stages of the campaign. I haven't really drawn many maps of settlements, and I'm yet to post anything of my own to the Cartographers Guild, so this felt like the right time to take the plunge and share some of my work here.

I tned to work directly in pen rather than sketching with pencil first, so the first thing to share really is the initial scan.



Scanned at 600dpi and saved as a PDF (though this image is a 300dpi jpg just to make the file size smaller here). The next step is in Illustrator - which I'm going to go and do right now.

I'd love any feedback on this, though I'm planning to finish it up tonight to get it posted to my site along with the campaign log. That said, any advice I can get now will almost certainly help me next time. One of my biggest bugbears with these kinds of maps is getting my roads to look good, so any feedback around that would be great. It should also be obvious that, at this point in my development as a cartographer, I'm very much aping Mr Dyson's style. I do eventually want to branch out and start making my maps look like mine, but I'm working on a solid foundation first.

I'll be working on this tonight, so I image there will be another update along shortly.

[loottheroom]

I cleaned this up very quickly in order to post it on time, but I'm not happy with the black and white look for this one (and that grey border is horrible...plus the labels just look bad).



As far as 'finalising' that went - I have a preset on Image Trace in Illustrator for my handdrawn dungeon maps, so I just threw that on it and added some labels. With the dungeon maps it works well, and I can go from scanning to having something I'm happy to post online in just a few minutes. I had to tweak it a little to pick up on the finer lines here (the farmland is a 0.05mm pen), but it worked as it always does - I just don't like this style for this kind of map.

So I decided to take the plunge and try to colour this thing, and I'm making a start. I'm very early on in the process and trying to decide if I want outlines on my roads or not. I'm tending towards not, but now that I'm in Photoshop I can keep two separate layers for my lines - one with road outlines and one without - and I can make a final decision once the rest of the visual style of the map starts to come together. This is what I'm working with currently:


With outline but no shading (yet)


No outline, basic colour blocking in place on just the roads

[loottheroom]

I've started adding colour now. Initially I was following Jonathon Roberts' fantastic tutorial, but try as I might I couldn't get anything approaching the same results as his. Probably something to do with the background texture I'm using, but that's fine - I'm trying to learn, and blindly following a tutorial never teaches you as much as having to fumble your way to similar results.

So, progress. The trees are coming along nicely and I think I'm happy with my decision to omit the outlines of the roads, though I still have the option to put them back in. I started on the river before I realised it might be a good idea to take a screenshot of my progress.

[loottheroom]

It's now 1pm and I haven't yet been to bed, so... yeah, I've been busy. Here's where I'm at currently - I think I'm more or less done at this point, though I'd love any feedback I can get.

[Abu Lafia]

Hey loottheroom, that's a very nice town map. Good job! I'd have love to see the colored version with the road/green outlines too. Two things come to my mind. 1) Are the white houses just not colored yet? Otherwise, i think the contrast with the dark brown buildings is a bit harsh. Also the general dark tone of the buildings is somewhat covering your nice hatching linework on the roofs. 2) To my taste, the forest outlines could be a bit more "bubbly", but that is just my personal view and i think they work very nice with the other elements. Keep up the good work!

[loottheroom]

Hey Abu, thanks for the feedback! The white buildings are stone whereas the rest of the town is of wooden construction, but I guess I could make that clearer. The hatching on the roofs does come through a little more at full size (this is 25% size for uploading here) but I might go back and address that. If I get a chance later I'll put the road outlines back on and see what people think.

Thanks again for the feedback, much appreciated!

[jylny]

If I had to point things out, I'd say 1) the title is a bit hard to read; there's a lack of contrast. But that's not really map related XD 2) The color of the river seems rather grayish and murky. It might serve you better to go for a lighter blue. 3) Graphically, the colors on a whole are a little too saturated for my taste. I don't know what programs you're using, though.

Cool stuff, though! I haven't really done much digital cartography yet.