B/W Map of Noros handlettered map and timelapse video

[Tiana]

Finished black and white digitally inked/painted maps for a novel.

Timelapse of the two maps for this series I made. This is for upcoming novel Gatewatch by Joshua Gillingham. In this video you'll see me working on 3 distinctly different map regions. I chickened out of doing a split perspective and just did two boxes (reason being, I was definitely not being paid enough for that kind of challenge). If I were hired to do it again for twice the money I'd try the split perspective shift I had imagined when I was first commissioned to do it, but I had to make time based decisions especially since I was handlettering the whole thing.

You'll see me bounce back and forth between a couple of programs; Other World Mapper is GREAT for what it does but limited to no raster creation functionality means I can't do any of my texture stacking, blurring, drawing, or hand lettering, so I have been taking to using it to create a vector base which I draw on top of. This saves me time if a client asks for a significant change to the base, since I don't have to go through dozens of steps to tweak it. While I have hopes the program will eventually be a one stop, at this point I can't do my illustrative options inside of it, so back and forth it is. Because of this, there are a couple of steps I missed recording, but I think they're self-explanatory... the main one is that, I brought in the second map and added a texture and flipped it to grayscale off-camera. I believe all I did was select an appropriate texture, set it to multiply, and removed the saturation and maybe tweaked the levels a bit. Easy to achieve without the video step by step.

I've tried to keep my screen capturing at a speed where people who are interested in my process can still make out what I'm doing.

Why hand letter, you might wonder? Yeah, sometimes I ask myself that too, when I'm halfway into it... but I've always been fascinated by hand-lettering in COMICS and on MAPS, so I started hand-lettering my old webcomic and it became a natural thing to try on maps when asked for "something that looks like it was made in world by this character and what they have available to them" or "an old fashioned style fantasy map like in print books"

I think I regret, a tiny bit, that I wasn't bold enough to try the split-perspective without a dividing box. I used to do comic panels with trick panels with no borders or weird borders, and really enjoyed the results, but I've never once applied that to mapping. My history as a comic artist is some of why I love Clip, I guess, because it has some amazing features for comic creators, such as the panel tool and the speech bubble tool and the speedlines tool, all of which I've never touched for a map.

Here's the video.