It's been a while since I've posted an actual WIP, so I figured I'd make my next one something we don't see here very often.

I don'd tend to post much here and when I do it's invariably something to do with the world that I've been working on for years. Usually it's a new kind of world map or regional map to do with something I'm writing at the moment. This time I'm going to try a globe, which is something I've wanted to do for a long time.

One reason is because a well-made globe of a fantasy world is not something e see very often (to be honest I don't think I've ever seen one before, though please correct me if I'm wrong!), possibly because most fantasy maps are flat and don't take into account the world's curvature. Another reason is just because its something I've always wanted to try, even before I started to dabble in worldbuilding. Another reason is that I think it will help make Elyden seem like a 'real' world.

Why haven't I made one before? Anyone who's tried to make a proper globe with paper gore pasted to a sphere will know just how difficult and precise an ordeal globemaking really is. Assuming you're using 12 gores, each of 30 degree (I'd prefer 18-24 separate gores, but I'm yet to find a program I like that can make more than 30 degree gores), I might cut the gore too small, or the sphere might not be perfect - every error has a cumulative effect on the next gore, and the next gore... until the last gore glued onto the sphere overlaps with the first one. not good! And most importantly - gluing flat pieces of paper to a sphere is incredibly difficult to do without either ripping the paper or creating folds. The globe itself will be 25-30cm in size depending on the polystyrene spheres I find.


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So that's enough preamble. Here's the first WIP of the map:

GLOBE.jpg

where possible I plan on making each individual label (yes, there will be lots of labels ... :p) self-contained within an individual gore, as splitting text between gores will not be easy to do. Obviously it's not something that can be completely avoided, particularly with large labels, like oceans.

The poles will be individual discs 10 degrees wide that will be stuck to the top of the globe. I haven't started work on those yet, though have a good idea of how work will progress.

I really hope this materializes. The digital map will not be much of an issue. It's the physical globe that's worrying me. I'm going to be doing some dummy globes with smaller spheres to test out the gluing and overlapping, which are the things I'm the most perturbed by