The Principality of Leshan and her neighbors

[Malakor]

Well,

I decided to brush off my old fantasy campaign and it seriously needed some new maps, since I wasn't 100% happy with the old ones I had done.

I started last week with doing up the new landmass shapes based (very roughly) on the last map I had done in Illustrator a couple of years ago (attached). One of the things I'm going to do this time around is not make the Leshan area so small in comparison to the rest of the continent, but try to use the same, general basics on placement and such.

I fought with how I wanted my map to look for several days. I did one in color that I liked the general colors, but I was very unhappy with how my mountains looked on it.

I put it away for a few days and realized this morning that part of what I really like in my fantasy maps is to have a hand-drawn look, like all the hand-drawn maps that I've filled sketchpads and loose bits of paper with for years, so why not just hand draw them?

I sat down with the landmass layer on one screen of my computer and the crappy old Illustrator map on the other so I could get a rough Idea of where I wanted to put mountains, grabbed some blank paper and started drawing mountain ranges and a few individual peaks while I was at it.

I scanned all of this and either created brushes (for the small bits) and/or copy and pasted the scanned images into my map (after dumping the white background of the scans).

So far, I'm much more pleased with the results than I've been with other stuff I've done lately. I did copy and paste a couple of bits more than once, so there may be some obvious replication to the mountains (not sure), but they are all hand-drawn mountains.

I'll be doing more to it, going to play with the idea of doing forests the same way next, since it's the other area I can't get my computerized versions to satisfy me on.

Anywho, all that is just build up to show you my latest efforts. . .

Oh, this has been reduced in size for placing on the forum, the original is set up for 24" x 18" or 36" x 24", don't remember off the top of my head which. And the rough scale (which I've not put on the map yet), is that the area of leshan (the peninsula on the east coast) is about 350-400 miles across at it's widest point.