July 2007 Entry: Grandmother's Tale (aka Red Riding Hood)

[Duvik]

I'm likin' the way ye did the Conscience river and how the foresty area sort of clears just enough to show the path of the river through it...

I like the way the rivers themselves look...

I like the fractal outline along the road... it's just awesome how somethings so simple conveys so much. I'm refering to the fact that i can tell that all that green area is a forest even though there is no foresty texture save for the edges.

Very nice.

[Publius]

Thanks everybody! I'll give it the once-over tomorrow morning and decide whether to submit it as-is or make a few tweaks. I try to give this sort of thing a few days of "downtime" so that I can see the work with fresh eyes.

Regarding the style, thanks again for the comments. I'm looking at most of the maps here, the styles are a quite different from mine and frnakly, I wasn;t sure if folks would like my style. The Photorealistic angle doesn't really work well with illustrator, and I prefer a very simple clean line for my own work (when I do it it looks somewhat shabby, although I certainly can and do like that look when done by others more capable than myself -- I guess that it would be analogous to a musician who is accomplished in one type of music but appreciates other forms even if he doesn't have the knack for them). There is also a practical angle, most of my work gets printed in black and white, so there really is no need for a lot of color and many of the more subtle details would be lost anyway.

I'm very glad people seem to like this however.

[Publius]

I'm likin' the way ye did the Conscience river and how the foresty area sort of clears just enough to show the path of the river through it...

I like the way the rivers themselves look...

I like the fractal outline along the road... it's just awesome how somethings so simple conveys so much. I'm refering to the fact that i can tell that all that green area is a forest even though there is no foresty texture save for the edges.

Very nice.

One interesting thing about the road: it isn't really a fractal. I applied a pattern to the stroke of the road which is an amalgam of larger dots than those used for the roadbed. By making the stroke 3 points wide it gives the broken appearance. Thus it defines without overwhelming and looks very fractal-like because of the irregular way that I lay the road and the way that pattern fills/strokes work in Illustrator.

I have in the past (a recent map for HERO Games) used different methods to do this: a dotted line that I have given an irregular dash-gap ratio then applied a guassian blur to, but frankly I like this method a whole lot more. Plus it is a lot easier.

I try to do everything (map-wise) in that spare style, convey as much as you can with as little as possible and that sort of thing. Sometimes I come up short, but here I have been very happy with the outcome.

[Publius]

Updated (and Final) Version. Not really all that much in the line of changes.

I presume that I do not need to post this on a "fresh" thread??

### Winner ###