[WIP] Hand drawn regional map
Here is a project I started recently, a trial for a better looking hand drawn map with lots of details.
I have been drawing fictional map for years, but they have not been visually very impressive, and I have made more thematic maps than basic maps with labels, colors and legends. After reading through this forum I have got inspiration to try to make more artistic and better looking maps, so here it is. I'll keep drawing maps by hand, but now I have better paper, betters pens an bigger plans.
The map is about a country in the continent of Melero, which I introduced in the Finished maps subforum https://www.cartographersguild.com/s...ad.php?t=39065. This was already a couple of years old project, but I it's nice to broaden and deepen the world, and it's a good starting point. The new map is about one of the eleven countries, still have to figure out the name (and all the other names as well). The paper is A3-size, and the scale of the map is 1:3 000 000 so the area shown is 816 km x 867 km. As a base for the style of the map I will mostly use an old world atlas from 1959. Elevation will be shown with contours and colours, I won't probably use any shading.
The attached image is a photograph of the situation now (sorry for the bad quality, I know it's hard to see anything). I started by drawing a grid which hepls the copying of the elements from the previous maps. (Previous maps were drawn to 7mm grid paper of A4 size, and here I drew 17mm grid). Then I copied the coastlines and rivers. It's now basically a sketch, the coastlines and rivers will have much more detail when I finish them. The goal is that in the end it looks like the old maps are a generalisation of this new map. Also the grid will be erased in the end, maybe I'll then add a new grid of latitudes and longitudes for visual purpose.
There is still a lot to do. I will continue with the copying of elevation, then adding detail to the contours and coastlines and drawing them with ink, then the same with rivers, and then all the cities, roads and railroads. After that I'm not sure whether I'll write the labels also by hand or continue with computer. Also I'm not sure should I do the colouring by hand or with the help of some software. There would be more to learn, I'm not even sure what software to use to colour a scanned image. We'll see.
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