French Indochina - 1930 - Pen and paper

[Sergy096]

Here is my latest map. I went with a historical setting. I would like to try adding colour in a future map but won't be this one and I'm also thinking about using A3 as A4 starts to feel quite small, although is it a comfortable format in terms of storage and takes way less time.

How could I improve the texture of the ground?

[waldronate]

What you have there is stylistically a clean map of the area. It's the sort of map that would work well as a printed line-art map in a book. I'm not sure that adding more would be helpful at this point. with adding to the clarity of the map for that style or what you can do directly with pen and ink with the relative scale of the linework to the canvas size.

If you were to prepare this sort of thing to look like it was to go to the printers, one option might be to add a halftone pattern to the areas of the map that aren't the focus (one tone for non-focused land and another for sea). I'm not sure how well that would work with the standoff coastlines, though. Another option might be to add a pale tone (perhaps a cream) to the areas of interest. I'm not sure how to go about this using traditional media, however, and would probably do that sort of thing digitally.

[Robulous]

Very nice, but isn't that whole area between northern Vietnam and Laos very mountainous?

[Sergy096]

Yes, it was more like a design decision there. I didn't want to overcharge the map with mountains. I tried to paint the map digitally but I wasn't really happy with the result.