The World of Nossym

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Hello everyone!

I haven't posted a map in a long time and I'm very sorry about that. The main reason is because life has this dirty way of interfering with my mapping plans. It's very frustrating not having enough time to draw because of overloads of work (but sometimes I also wonder if it's not just this frustration that is also a driving force... it's another debate). Another reason for this long cartographic silence is that I have embarked on projects that are a little too ambitious... and that it takes a lot longer to get there with something presentable. Among these projects, there is my very first map of the world, and this is the one I am publishing today, after 5 months of more or less continuous work.

In fact, this is not my very first map of this world: in 2014, I had just discovered Campaign Cartographer, and like any good, confident beginner, I immediately embarked on the map of this world (maybe I'll dare show you the result of this brave and unconscious ambition later, but it will be a little mortifying for me). This is the world of Nossym, which we created with my wife, to serve as a landscape for the adventures she writes. The coastline was drawn from the spots on our dog's coat at the time (a classic, I think). Since 2014, three volumes of a little girl's adventures and her dragon(s) have already been written (none have been sent to a publisher yet), and I have made many maps or illustrations to detail this world: maps of regions, cities or buildings. But I always knew I should come back to this map of the whole world.

I started working on it at the beginning of July, taking great inspiration from Saderan's tutorial: a guide so effective and so well done that Tear deserves a lot of medals. I had to improvise quite a bit for some areas, but the system is so well described that it makes life much easier for cartographers.

I took a long time to finish this map, because I decided to take time and not to rush. I didn't set a deadline and try to focus on the current task rather than imagine what would happen next. I find it difficult to take my time, because I always want to see the finished result, it was a kind of learning experience for me.

Enough talk, let's draw... The map was entirely made on Photoshop, for the dragons, I was inspired by models found on the internet, and here is the result :



Feel free to comment and criticize