Town Near a Quarry

I found myself alone with a pencil and some graph-paper today, and did a little doodle.

This is a small village that built up because of a quarry and a river. The quarry is fairly old, and now has a small lake in it from collected rainwater. The village used to have a large hotel for the barge workers to stay, but it was destroyed.

I haven't decided where to go with the map... Thinking of bringing it into Inkscape and inking over it in vector, then switching to GIMP for colouring.

As usual, looking for suggestions/comments/criticisms.

-Rob A>

I don't really have any constructive criticism at this point; all I can say is that I really like it and am anxious to see what you come up with.

I'll ditto that, rwaluchow! Work on it, Rob--quit being such a slacker! ;)

I agree... I want to see some more!! :D

A few learned lessons.

1) Don't sketch on graphpaper.
2) Inking on screen is hard, even with a tablet....any pointers?
3) Don't bother with anything other than the finest tipped pens.

Since I couldn't eliminate the graph lines well, and I suck at tablet inking, I picked up a fresh pad of tracing paper and some cheap pens (Faber Castell PITT pens in the S,F,M,B 4 pack).

Here is where I am now (1/2 size scan). I will move on to colouring using GIMP....

-Rob A>

This is looking very nice, Rob. I can't wait for the coloring, because I think that will really make all the features pop! Awesome fun.

(And no, I have no pointers for inking on screen--I can't get the same smooth feel with my tablet either. I wonder if that is true on a high-end tablet, too?)

First start at colouring. I am using Don's city palette, and it just feels bleah to me.

Think it is time to look at other maps and start borrowing colour schemes...

-Rob A>

I like how you drew the water around the rocks, makes the map seem more "living."

Good eye for detail, and the colors look awesome thus far... Not really screaming "bleah" to me, but I guess that just a personal taste thing. :)

Keep up the good work!

lessons learned while trying to ink with a tablet:
1) use a hard round pen with no pen pressure or dynamics.
2) slow and steady wins the race. patience is a virtue.
3) like inking with pen and paper, spin the canvas around so that you don't have to turn your wrist at an awkward angle. This was actually harder to do if you didn't stick to 90° turns, as the canvas got bigger and bigger and bigger if you used the arbitrary rotation command... I found that creating an action for 5° turn, 1° turn helped to quicken the process of turning it. And cropping the image when it got too big. Pain in the neck? YES... but the benifit was that the inking was easier and smoother than trying to ink a line that I had to turn my wrist a certain way which would cause a mistake or less than desirable look. Also, when rotating, it's easier to ink lines that are generally in the same direction while you have it rotated is better than having to rotate multiple times to that same degree just to ink one line here.. and one line there...

Hope that helps... actually.. I hope that made sense....

This was in PS, btw... I don't know GIMPS commands... sorry.

RobA - Just a thought, but maybe your bleah feeling has to due with the fact that the majority of your colors are greens and blues. Maybe adding some more gray, brown, and tan would liven it up. Maybe even some reds or oranges (somehow) thrown in to liven up the palette.