The last map I posted is from a backlog that I will eventually get all up in the forum - sneak peak in my gallery - but this one, I just finished! I've been working on it, off-and-on, for what seems like a couple years. This one is very different from "Legends." It is particularly...fanciful.

HexForPub.jpg

The culture of this world is having a bit of a renaissance: they are discovering frontiers of architecture, science, commerce, and engineering. The terrain of rolling hills gives way to basaltic columns - which the cartographer emphasizes, likely beyond plausibility, as an artifact of this renaissance. Those columns shape the flow of nearby waterways. Scattered around the region are representations of monuments and landmarks: the White Palace, the Water-Whele, the Observatorie, the Derrick, the Beacone.

I've had this idea lodged in my head for a while, to do a map along the lines of, oh, every hexagon-dominated sci-fi map ever. I wanted to caricature the Giant's Causeway, and I had the goal of using the hexagonal columns to play with the flow of water. That turns out to be only a minor feature of this map, playing second fiddle to the color. I'm particularly happy with the color blending I got in the peninsula just below center-left. The labels are something I've done before, incoherent scribbles that try to give the impression of glyphs, but pushed further than I've done before to include bullet lists and parenthetical notes.

My tripod broke, and this one had a lot of warping when I painted it, so there are some blur and focus issues with the image. If I can get a better picture, I'll post it.

I can already anticipate some of the things you will probably note about this map. But I'll let you do it yourselves!