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Thread: C map, fertile valley

  1. #1

    Wip C map, fertile valley

    So, this is a very, very rough work in progress.

    I'm concerned that I've made the land itself appear too small- I haven't decided on a definite scale, but it's certainly a very long glacial valley/basin taking several days to traverse by horse in the best cases.

    I'd like to give the impression of it being even bigger, but I'm not exactly sure how large it should be.

    The houses and such make it look extremely small- I was trying to exaggerate them symbolically, but I may have gotten ahead of myself. What do you think?

    Also, I'm not sure about my erosion depiction on the walls of the valley.

    I'm a little nervous with the, hopefully, interesting Sandstone formations in the desert and how realistic that is in context to the Eastern landforms.

    Any criticisms definitely appreciated.
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  2. #2
    Administrator Redrobes's Avatar
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    Lovely concept, nice mountains, excellent lighting and color etc.

    Several days travel across that - well those houses are either utterly huge or those mountains are very small. Thats about an hours walk. There's basically a scale issue here. Have a blast on google maps over the Alps or similar and check out the scales of houses to mountains. Very hard to depict both in true scale on the same map.

    Edit -- gotta say tho - that tower top right on the cliff. That's just crying out to be mapped and adventured tho eh ? Could nearly visualize some views at odd and precipitous angles up towards it from the base and then like Torq's challenge map with the bats etc the view from the top tower with scary heights involved. Yeah awesome.
    Last edited by Redrobes; 02-25-2009 at 07:54 PM.

  3. #3
    Community Leader Facebook Connected torstan's Avatar
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    Looks good so far. Interesting sketch style you've got going on there.

    I'm a little curious as to why the desert remains dry with all of that snow and ice right to the north of it.

    I do think that the valley looks very small. This is probably an artefact of the fact that the mountains are really big rather than the size of the town buildings. The valley looks like its about one mountain wide and few mountains really take a day to walk right across in horizontal distance let alone 10 days. If you shrink the mountains it will become very obvious that the town images are symbolic rather than to scale.

  4. #4
    Guild Artisan Hoel's Avatar
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    I love the style. I think the houses are a bit big, but I kan really see what you're trying to do with the symbol thing.
    The desert looks.. unfinished, can't really say either way there. The mountains look really nice, you've got my approval at least.
    One small thing I don't like is the fields. You should go with a dark green or maybe yellow or brown instead of black. You've captured the countour of the lands nicely with the field patterns.
    I'll keep an eye on this

  5. #5
    Guild Journeyer Morkhdull's Avatar
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    The comic's look is fine. Giving the overall a feeling a freshness and "kind of happiness"...

    This style of map describes an atmosphere where, usually, long sentences and many words overwhelm the details...

    I enjoy Bravo !

  6. #6
    Community Leader Facebook Connected Steel General's Avatar
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    Very nice, I really like the ice sculpture at the head of the valley...but you definitely need to work out the scale issue.
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  7. #7
    Community Leader Guild Sponsor Korash's Avatar
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    I really like the way the map looks. The way things look to me is reminiscent of the medieval maps where the symbol of something was way off for scale but maybe the scale of the map was not important anyway. The map was to show the basic position of something in relation to something else, not intended to give actual distances.

    My first thought of the map was "detailed where things were known and fuzzy where they weren't" and I think it does that well.
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  8. #8
    Guild Artisan landorl's Avatar
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    I love the style, it is quite unique and well executed.

    I think that the big problem is scale. I don't know how hard it would be, but I would suggest doubling the size of the map, but keep all of the features the same size. Thus there will be a bigger gap between everything.

  9. #9
    Community Leader jfrazierjr's Avatar
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    What a great piece of art! I am fine with the scale differences IF you reduce the spacing so that it does not appear that that whole series of islands is one large city. ie, less buildings grouped together and spread out the groupings.

    One thing, now that I look at it closer, I hope the southern mountains are not yet complete at this time. Those northerly mountains are just spot on and EXCELLENT!
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  10. #10
    Community Leader Facebook Connected Ascension's Avatar
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    I'm with Lando on this one...the overall image is rather small. Simply increasing the size of the land area while keeping the scale of the buildings the same would do much to help convey the sense your looking for without having to shrink the buildings. Thus you keep the detail that you want but it means more work on painting the rest of the stuff...trade-offs.
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