Yeah, I like the name better too, and of course the art and everything is a perfectly great conceptional beginning, it looks wonderful.
Focus on your commissions, though, man, those are way more important. Commissions are 100% of the reason I have 0 badges. Clients pay you money. Clients are your job. Challenge maps should be saved for when you have 0 clients, want to try something you've never tried before, want to practice doing something you don't feel good enough at performing for clients, not something you do to escape doing almost exactly the same thing for someone else's vision. When the only significant difference between doing a challenge map and a client map is that the challenge map gets to be mostly your concept, it strikes me as a bit amateur to prioritize a fun challenge over a professional agreement.
I might be taking it a bit personally. It's not just because I too have commissions preventing me from finishing challenge artwork. Here's the rest of the story.
A while back I sent a client a sketch for a city painting and they told me to trash it all because they had hired a world/country map artist who did detailed city symbols which clashed with my vision, an artist who was admittedly better than me in my opinion. That client told me to stop all work until the other artist was done their work due to my toes being trampled and them wanting the paintings to match the map. I have not heard from them since. I assume it's possible I'll never hear from them again because that artist got their claws in and from my perspective they were superior in every way and I would definitely pick over myself. This however, could just be my anxiety voice.
Anyway, I'm pretty sure YOU are the other artist based on the art style. Your comment made me realize it's possible it might not be that the client is no longer interested in having me finish the city painting, but that the map commission with the city icons isn't finished yet. It deserves finishing and will be a bloody epic map once it's done. I think it encapsulates what the writer told me about his vision very well.
You would be able to verify this if it is the case as you would have referenced my art for your art on one of the icons.
So if you're just fussing around with this as a distraction from an admittedly much harder map for a client, git back to work. Your craft is solid, you hardly need to practice, but you do need to complete those agreements you've made. While I do think this map is quite lovely, I'd much rather you do your job as a professional cartographer.
