Valcian Steel

[Auth]

Whew!

First of all, my apologies for not being as active as I would have wanted - shortly after I posted my first Valcia Map, my wife gave birth to a beautiful baby girl, and fatherhood has taken up much of my time.

But at any rate, here's my newest version of Valcia.

I started this project as a conceptual detour to merge both traditional fantasy cartography with a more modern steel design interface (which is far more my personal style preference), and the result is Valcian Steel. My intent was to create an accurate depiction of Valcia on a large sheet of chiseled, engraved steel. Also, this project was a rather conservative venture as I tried to do more with less. You'll notice that the only terrains added on top of the land texture are the forests, hills, and mountains. This was intentional as I didn't want to detract from the overall brushed steel texture of the land masses.

(The original map of Valcia can be found here)

Another thing I was pleased about was with the increased size of the map, I could now include far more detail into labeling the various landscapes and terrains that I was unable to do so legibly in the first version of Valcia. For instance, you'll notice now that every river has been named and several terrain features now bear a label (Carion Cliffs, for example).

Created in Adobe Illustrator/Photoshop, the original file resolution is 14,400 x 10,800 and is being printed and framed for my office, which has been my intent all along.

However, the first attached image has been scaled down 75%.

Unfortunately, some of the detail that went into this piece was lost due scaling it down. Most notably are the mountains - in the print there is much more fine detail than what shows.

The other 4 attachments are are quarters of the map scaled down to 50%. Much more detail can be seen in these, but are less convenient to view.

But at any rate, here they are. Let me know what you all think - I've had a rather long love/hate relationship with this project, and am quite relieved to finally share it on here with you all, haha.

Some of my personal favorite points of interest include the areas of/around Lake Stant, Weret Bay, Aibrel Islands, the Serician Spires, Mount Morath and, of course, the Compass Rose (among others).

Regards,

- Auth