Thread: Kitsumura, village in Kaidan

Oh I definitely plan on covering the back hills with trees, however since the background will show through in places, I wanted the ground to be there already. Same with the creek and falls, vegetations will be covering much of that - I want to place some Sakura cherry blossom trees, mulberry trees, cedars, twisted pines and ground vegetation too - including reeds along both banks of the creek after the falls as it moves across the bottom of the map. The bridge is already designed, just need to trace it and detail out to place on that road in the lower left corner.

I also plan to place various farm implements, clothes washing area and other village detritus throughout - this is still early on in the design, I just wanted every square inch covered ahead of time.

Edit: @ Ghostman, I just figured out what you meant about the varying widths comparing the top right to the bottom left. I will place some tree tops peaking out to emphasize this, but the bank of the stream at the bottom of the map rises just as high as the opposite bank, so much of the stream is hidden behind the bank - the stream is wider, you just can't see it.

GP

After making that single cedar try in the southeast corner of the village, I thought to myself, "Man, this is going to be a ton of work. How can I save myself some time...".

So I started searching for forest scenes in some coffee table books on Japan, I have at hand. Found a heavily pine forested mountainside and thought, near total coverage - that's what I need. So I hand drew a detailed mountainside of pine. I covered the background hills, foreground bottom, right and left side and the section between the stream and the village.

As the lone cedar in there, I plan to do several deciduous (leafy) trees at the base of the hill and around the village itself, just for some variety, but not nearly the work I had expected doing.

Bridge, farm implements and final trees, that's all I have left - almost done!

Edit: I see I need to scoot the forest in the top left corner up a bit.

GP

looking good GP but the pine trees have a bit heavy line in comparison to the other elements of the map. May I ask how you work, is it all handdrawn?

Its all hand-drawn with pen. Generally I work at 18 x 24 or 24 x 36, however elements of a map like trees are generally 8.5 x 11, but that's usually one tree at a time. Because I had so many trees to draw I did these on a letter size sheet, instead of full size. I may redo them, but that's lots of trees and pain in ass... we'll see in the next day or two.

I agree, but I may keep them. I have to write an adventure yet, this month.

GP

cool... sounds like the job I want *lol*

Decided to try a work around. I opened the hand-drawn lineart for the trees in PS, selected the black with a mask, shrunk the mask by 5 pixels, inverted then cleared the image, so now the black lines are thinner - still too to thick, but better than before. I really don't want to redraw all those trees at scale. So hopefully this will work.

Is it cheating? Yeah, so I'll do right next time, but its a work around.

Also added some more color detailing around the banks of the river.

GP

much much better, and no its not cheating, its working with the tools you have ... do you colorize in PS or is that also done by hand?

While I scan into PS, and I tweak color/contrast, etc in PS. Most all of my map work occurs in Xara Xtreme Pro 4.0 - its a vector program like Illustrator, CorelDraw, Serif DrawPlus. It does everything I need for less money than PS/Illustrator - very powerful and easy to use. I run a daytime graphic design/digital print studio and use that app for everything.

All coloring, bevels, shadows, feathering, special effects, even use of Photoshop Plug-ins are all done within Xara Xtreme.

I only draw linework by hand - everything else is digital.

GP

I'm calling this map done! Added some rice straw stacks, fences with dyed shirt drying, some odds and ends, and a few trees, oh yeah and the arched bridge.

Now I'll post this in the Finished Maps Forum...

Enjoy!

GP