Nice start, hope you can get it finished in time.
I'll try something simple, since the end of the contest period draws near. Another entrant sparked my interest when he noted he was annotating where his lighthouses were... I said to myself "and for some navigators, all they would need is locations and specs on the lighthouses". Well, that and any major obstacles like LAND :-).
So I grabbed some snapshots of sky-with-clouds, picked a likely one, slapped a bit of blur on it, and posterized it. I ran the number of levels up and down till I saw a pleasing set of random coastlines. If I cared about onshore topography that could have given me some semiplausible contours, but this is a dirt simple - no, saltwater-simple effort, so the zero contour would be enough: coastlines. But then one other band looked like reefs, so I kept it too. Filled lower bands with water color, upper with land-beige, and because my method gave a crisp pixellated shore, I aliased a coastline with 'find edges". Oh, after I manually etched a stretch of barrier islands on one coast - the sort of thing a simple cloud-generation won't give you.
Which gave me this:
### Latest WIP ###
lighthouses-1.jpg
Now all I need is a bit more time to play, I mean map, and maybe I can finish an entry.
Nice start, hope you can get it finished in time.
My Battlemaps Gallery http://www.cartographersguild.com/al...p?albumid=3407
OK, so with a variety of lighthouses indicated, and a few lightships...
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Lighthouses3.gif
Ai-yi-yi... 80 or 90 of them. Why do I do this to myself?
Next up, the light pattern of each. I'll intentionally do it a little differently than Earthly charts do... at least for starters.
You WILL have a couple extra days, just FYI. I won't be able to get enough free time to close things up and set up the poll until probably Sunday morning or early afternoon.
And with the various light/dark patterns:
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Nautical4.jpg
That's a lot of lighthouses!
My Battlemaps Gallery http://www.cartographersguild.com/al...p?albumid=3407
Yeah, it seems like a lot. I was thinking I'd have to set the scale fairly small to justify all them. Maybe 400 to 800 miles across this map. But my instincts were based on *surviving* lighthouses. Back in the day, some stretches of coast warranted a beacon every ten miles, with clusters at complicated inlets and harbors that would be WAY out of line with what I'm willing to depict :-). Take a look at the lighthouses of Newfoundland or the lighthouses of Maine for instance.
So I'm going to set an era of maybe 1850-1900 equivalence, and I'll say these are just the principal open-sea navigation beacons... for harbor lights, see additional sheets. And maybe the width of this chart is more like 100-120 miles. I can't pretend it's much of a navigational aid anyway, unless I show channels and depths. <shrug> Maybe it's for canoeists, not ocean liners.
NavForCanoeists.jpg
A bit of a legend, marked channels and some fixed-beacon navaids. Some people develop a conlang for their worlds. If conlang = "constructed language" then this is more like sklang ( = "sketched language"). The scale is sketched too - "imperial leagues" are somewhere in the Earthly kilometer - mile - league range, but there's no need to get any more specific.
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Lighthouses6.jpg
Next up, some more labeling, and seashore cultural elements.
Not a WIP for contest purposes, since it's not a pretty stage, but I thought I'd show how I go about getting curved labels, without much effort. My main tool is Serif PhotoPlus, but it doesn't do text-along-curve. Serif's DrawPlus does, even their free "Starter Version" which is what I used. So I import to DP a flat version of the map as a single layer, then type a bunch of names in two large, somewhat spaced-out text blocks. If you look too close at the language you'll think it's ME who's spaced-out :-) - remember this is neither an earthly lingo, nor a particularly coherent invented one. Here they're in Times Roman - I'll hopefully remember to shift to Garamond or Georgia or whatever I was using in PhotoPlus, before I rasterize and export. I just select all the text in a block, shift to the node tool, and hit 'text along user shape'. Then I drag nodes till I like the curve - doing one up and one down gives me a nice array of possibilities. Eventually I'm going to be selecting single names and dragging them to wherever I need a slant like just *so*. What a cape or bay is named will be dependent on what fits... can't do this quite so cavalierly when there's predefined geography to be mapped.
Since I have as base the exact map I have divvied into layers over in PhotoPlus, I'll be importing the labels over there, as one properly registered and arranged array.
Lighthouses7Labels.jpg
Huh - now I look at it, seems like I've distorted the whole thing to a curve, instead of getting the text to sit upright along curves. Dang - gotta get that right.
Last edited by jbgibson; 06-15-2013 at 09:33 PM.
Oh - it was just compressed E-W - no problem. Anyway, here's my "simple" effort finished:
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Lighthouses7Finito.jpg
My computer with 8MB RAM crashed a while after post 8 above - fortunately I had a file saved elsewhere. I finished the silly thing on a 1MB RAM machine, which was an exercise in patience :-/ .
My oversimple way of getting a flock of curved labels obviously meant not all would be ideally curved for aesthetics. But I think the result is better than if had to make do with straight and simple slanted labels.
Last edited by jbgibson; 06-16-2013 at 03:30 AM.