I found myself to be dissatisfied with the map as I'd slipped into Photoshop tricks that look good but detract from the internal reality of the piece. This is supposed to be a map hand drawn by someone with considerable skill in old school cartography and a firm grasp of geography, along with another map to use as reference.

I (re)started by puttering around on the tutorial board until I discovered an old tutorial from Hapimeses and watched it http://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=1669. I enjoyed the tutorial and liked the approach as well as the results. I decided to play with it and see if I could match it as I am fairly new to the tablet. After a big of experimentation, I was able to achieve passable mountains.

It took many hours to draw the mountains. As you can see, there are many of them, each hand-drawn. No brushes other than a 3-pixel hard brush and a five pixel soft for the highlights. I did a number of things differently from the tutorial because they worked better for my map.

I also replaced all of the type with hand-drawn letters. This is simply a matter of tracing the fonts using a calligraphy brush, but it takes a steady hand, patience and lots of redos.

At this stage, only the frame and pictographs are not hand drawn. I still have much to do, including forest, hills, roads, town markers and compass rose, scale etc.

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