[WIP] Magna Mappa Mundi (Europe, Western Asia, and North Africa)

[Cookiegod]

Hi there,
The thread is a bit of a mess and too much text wall. Apologies. Skip as much of it as you feel like, feedback appreciated, also and especially negative feedback.
Quick things to get of my chest first: Been a lurker here for a long time, love the community and the good maps here, never had something finished enough that I felt it worthy to show. This project is somewhat different. For one, we're two guys working on it, and secondly, we're a tad ambitious and we'd really appreciate any feedback we can get.

The goal: The goal is to make a "fantasy" style, flexible map of the world. By flexible I mean we'll be able to zoom in and just use crops from it whenever we feel like it.
Flexible also means that we'll likely have to make the mountains twice, once for a more zoomed out map, and once for when we want to do more zoomed in crops of it.
From that absolutely huge, 17221x11671px large map we can then make many small historical maps that suit our needs. We are both fans of history and writing and we can then make those small maps to illustrate whatever we want to show in our stories. Also I've never fully understood why maps on wikipedia about for instance 11th century Spain can't be as beautiful as those one can find here.

However, we're nowhere near there yet, but very much at the beginning. Which is why the images look very similar to satellite images, even though they are not.
The big map would cause large load times, etc., so I'm instead posting a smaller, 8000x5422px version of part of what we have so far below:

Note again that this isn't at all how it's supposed to look in the end. The landmass is simply a colourinverted version of the heightmap I made, and the ocean I simply coloured black/blueish for now.

Approach: 1: We snipped a large number of more zoomed in maps together. As a result there isn't much curvature in the map, instead there are stitches, which shouldn't be visible however. For this we used Gimp.
2: We then used Inkscape to make an upscaled version of it, by tracing the bitmaps and creating svgs. We also created a heightmap version of it. However, because of this workaround, the height scaling isn't continuous but rather consists of a total of 20 different steps, which are noticeable if for example one tries to use Wilbur:

But generally speaking the amount of detail is good enough for us, though these steps do create some issues.
3: Our next issues are rivers and mountains, the issue here being the different zoom levels. The rivers (I THINK! not sure yet) will be less of a problem, I just make them a tad wide now, and they can then be thinned when one zooms in. I also like wide rivers, as they allow for bridges to be shown.
To do the rivers, I also have a map version with the rivers from the satellite images. But those ain't pretty. So I trace the rivers with my graphic tablet and on Krita instead of Gimp.
I am not an expert at all at Krita, I just know it has the better brushes.

As the large map often makes my laptop scream for suicide, I use cropped out versions of the map for the next step. We can then copy, paste and move the stuff in the big map once we're done. So far, I have only done so for Spain:

The rivers might be a bit wide, according to my friend. I'm not entirely sure yet. I'm also thinking that I'd like to have some space in the larger rivers to draw in dashed lines for trade routes, travel routes, borders or similar. On the other hand he's probably right that they're a bit too domineering on the map.

The second thing to be aware of is that there are too many rivers on the map. I simply drew too many of them. For one, because I was a bit unsure which ones we'd need, and secondly because the work-around is fairly simple: Using a layer mask and making the smaller rivers transparent should do the trick. So the majority of the rivers shouldn't actually be there in the end.

I made a similar map earlier where I progressed much further with the rivers, you can see it in the spoiler below (and it also has too many rivers plus I didn't finish it everywhere):

 

4: All right, mountains: So far we've only talked about them. We probably have to do two versions of them, instead of one. My friend bought wonderdraft, which however appears to have some issues (it should be noted though that I never used it, and he only very little so far), and the program seems to have been made mostly with smaller maps in mind. But it appears to be really good for drawing mountain chains. So we'll probably be using that one, and once again work on only small bits of the map, and then copy the results into the large version itself. But I'm very much open for alternatives as well. So if you have any tutorials for how to do mountain chains, or stylistic ideas, let me know.

I'm kinda nitpicky when it comes to mountains, partly because I grew up in several mountain chains, but also because of the huge strategic importance mountain passes have. So I prefer not to just splatter mountains around in the general area, but place them in a way that makes sense. E.g.: to cross the great saint bernhard pass one had to travel like this:

Travel up the Aosta valley, then up a side valley, then cross the pass, down a different side valley, then down the lower part of the upper Rhone valley, pass the castle of Chillon, and then finally you'd be in Lausanne.
And I'd like to show that on one of my maps. So we'll probably have to draw the mountains twice. Once zoomed out, and once zoomed in.

Where we're at right now: Basically we're stuck in steps 3 and 4 for now. I'll probably do the rivers and lakes one at a time. Tracing one group usually doesn't take that much time, and even though I'm busy I'll take 15-30mins every couple of days to just do do one river group, then the next one, etc. We might btw. skip some parts of the map that we're less interested in. Mountains are a bit of a limbo, and any tips regarding smart ways to do them or pitfalls to avoid would be appreciated.

Style: I'll share a few old maps (mostly unfinished) I did earlier in the spoiler below. They are all flawed in many ways, but they're closer to the feel I'm going for than where I'm at now.

 

I need to put two of the images as links, as I hit the limit of 10 pictures per post:
Link 1
Link 2

Essentially I've been trying to do the same map for years, always stopping at some point, because I didn't like the result.

But more importantly, here's a version of the aforementioned Spain map where I drew the borders of 11th century Spain on it. I didn't do a particularly good job at it, and there are still way too many rivers, and the mountains are only the inverted heightmap, there are no cities or other symbols, and there's no parchment as background, etc. But it should give you the gist of it:

[Kilo11]

Hey folks, I'm the other guy working on this project! As Cook said above, we are working on splitting tasks here, as this is an unreasonably large map, and while some things can just be scaled up, there are still some bits that require manual labor, and more map means more labor. I had made the base file of the map that Cookiegod made massive, and now I am working on nothing more than creating artsy mountain layers for the huge map. The general idea I had for the mountains was to make them look similar to the ones I put in this map I made of Southern Arabia:

Arabia Felix Map

 

However, I am totally open to any thoughts or suggestions on better types of mountains, different types of mountains, or any other critiques and thoughts anyone might have!

[Cookiegod]

I tested some more on the Iberian crop-out. No mountains yet. If anyone has some input with regards to style, like which version they favour or even what should be done completely different, feel free to tell. For example I'm wondering whether I should colourise the sea when the land is coloured, and vice versa.

[Bindusara]

I think Al Andalus is too big
On the first and second map, the color of the south areas are not bright enough compared to the colors of the north areas, or not enough saturated

[Simkin]

I like more the 3rd version. And I'm agree with Bindusara, Al-andalus is occuping to much space.

[Cookiegod]

You guys are right on both points. The letters were (& probably still are) too large (also, I should probably change the fonts in general), and the colour grading was (& to a degree probably still is) somewhat off.



I went ahead and changed the north, rather than the south, as the goal is for this map to work within an even larger map, where lots of other areas too get subdivisions, so I'm trying a bit to balance showing the smaller areas & subdivisions vs the larger areas still being recognisable. For example now, you can see several areas with almost the same shade of pink (the kingdoms of Leon, Castile, Galicia and the county of Portugal), but these countries were all ruled by the same king. Thanks for your feedback so far

Oh btw. here's again an alternate version.

Colourless land seems to be the favourite. I removed the water shadows in this version, as the two otherwise blend too much together.

[Eowyn Cwper]

My God, this project is indeed huge! It's difficult to jump on the bandwagon and give worthy feedback right off the bat like that. I don't know if I can help much right now but I'll follow you guys and I'll try to react whenever I can!

[Kilo11]

Hey Cook, the political overlays for Spain are cool, and each works in its own way, but for my own take, I will almost always be for the colorless one (except maybe water being blue ). If you do want color though, I think you need more drab colors, or at least ones that don't "pop" as much. I mean, this is supposed to be a medieval map, but it looks so gaudy with the bright pinks and yellows. Use ruddy sand colors, blood reds, and moss greens. I want to feel the earth and sky in the color!


As to mountains, I am giving some first runs to them now, seeing how one best puts an overlay into Wonderdraft for to trace the ranges in a sensible fashion. Updates to that effect will (hopefully) be coming in this week.