Reply With QuoteIt's looking really good. That's some great mountains!
To give you the complete story of this map, I started it when I was 16 years old (I'm 28 now).
I downloaded a demo version of the "Fractal Terrains" software (ProFantasy softwares LTD) and I made this :
(from there, everything is hand-drawn)
Later, in 2014, I felt that fractal map was ulgy, so I came up with this B&W map to correct shapes and mountains :
But It still wasn't what I expected. The problem was that it didn't look like something large scaled, but much more an isle lost somewhere in an ocean than a real continent.
So I drew a new one at the end of the year, to put more details like more thiny mountains, some forests... shaping the map in a larger scale. By the way my brother put some colors using Photoshop.
Still an eternal dissatisfied, I did this one this year as you can see in the first post of this thread. I put back the B&W map here with a higher resolution than the previous one.
As you can see the work still in progress, I'm currently colorizing the map with colouring pencils.
It's a shame that the result does not translate the real effect on the scan, but it could give you an idea of what it will look at the end.
Then I'll come to the final step, probably with GIMP : labeling the colorized map.
Last edited by Veldrin; 06-19-2017 at 07:32 AM.
It's looking really good. That's some great mountains!
Finally I forgot the colour pencils to use felts. I already tried to colorize my underworld map this way, and I feel that's not so bad.
Thus I'll use the same method to colorize this continent. That's where I am so far, not so much is done but the result seems to be already better than with colour pencils. I wish I have the time to do it fast...
Looks amazing so far, can't wait to see the rest of it colored in. I love the shapes of your continents, they look so natural!
Thanks Diamond and pixelkitteh
Last edited by Veldrin; 11-17-2017 at 01:35 PM.
I'm back here !
Finally I didn't finish this map (the story of my life). I rather started a new one, because I got a graphpad in the meanwhile.
Thus I installed Illustrator and after a few tests I tried my map with new style in level lines (mainly because I just beggin with this software, but I need to train because I know that I can do so much better using all the functionalities).
Obviously the work is in progress. I just spent about 10 hours on the map for now. To give you an idea, I switched the last map 90° and started by the right side:
And I came up with this:
This little map is part of the bigger continent, which is not done yet. The real file is in format A3.
When I started, I wished to get something more detailed and bigger than what I can get with handmade maps. Now I work on greater format, but since it's done with vectors I can increase or decrease the size as I want.
I'll also work on the level lines of the oceans. I'm impatient of placing all the cities, the summits, the fortresses... And then I'll trace some ways between everything.
I'll update when ready
They are both good, the second one looks more like an atlas.
I spotted a few river problems.
Many of these errors are because rivers are splitting but in reality it is something rare, except in a delta.
It's the same thing with lakes, they rarely have more than one output.
You can find more detailed explanations on this page: https://www.cartographersguild.com/s...ead.php?t=3822
I included a map with the problematic areas :
My Deviantart: https://vincent--l.deviantart.com/
Azélor is right on the rivers.
Other than that, the elevation map looks great! Nice landshapes too. My hat is off to you for managing to map successfully with Illustrator, I've never gotten along with the software
I really like your last map! It is nice to see the way you have developed your mapping style.
I agree with diamond and mouse, your first few maps really do remind me of maps found in Fantasybooks back from the day... though I only started reading them in the early 90s! Brings back some good memories.
So do you still draw non-digitally aswell? I often think that it would make some things easier, but then you only have the one copy and if you make any mistakes (like choosing the wrong color, for example), everything's ruined. Also, I never felt that scanning a hand drawn map gave satisfactory results in terms of quality.
The level lines technique now gave me an idea for my maps. I'm really itching to get back to my computer now, but I'm at work.... Aaaargh!
In any case, I hope you'll see this through, it looks promising!
And what I forgot to say: I know why I love this forum. The people are mostly really polite and open minded, as one can see in the short discussion about different tastes between DanielHasenbos, Mouse and Diamond earlier on!
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