Christopher Harris is the author of a book series in the works: the Ring of Worlds. He commissionned me to make this map of an alien homeworld which will be the foundation for one of the books in the series. I'm sharing it with his permission, and for those interested, I will now go into some detail about my workflow!

I'm a vector artist, but drawing coastlines by hand is a hassle. A while ago, I figured out a workflow involving both raster and vector art that allowed me to transform a painting into an accurate-looking heightmap (that was Ourrhaia, a map that you can see at the bottom of the post). I've used the same workflow, after some refinement, to produce the map of Ôrëńen — a map which combines realism with reader-friendly features, that may be printed and will (hopefully!) inspire many a story set in its secret landscapes.

But the painting wasn't mine then, which meant that this time, I had to paint something myself in PhotoShop! This is what I came up with first.

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It didn't take me long to realise that this was too nifty to be realistic; topography is messy, and painting it with care just… doesn't work. So I made a mess, and kept making it messier.

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And messier.

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This is the render that I eventually managed to work with in Inkscape. I vectorialised it, and all I had to do next was to make it look good. That is, random, but in a geographically sensical way. This is my favourite part! Redrawing everything in detail took a couple of hours more, but at least the shapes were already satisfying. Added lakes, rivers… And I was done.

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It's almost unfortunate that Chris preferred to add alien features himself later on – I will miss working on Ôrëńen! Let me know what you think of my workflow and the map altogether. I hope you enjoyed finding out about it, and I will be happy to discuss anything about it! Here is the map of Ourrhaia I mentioned earlier (sorry for failing to center it!) — more of my work is available on my website. Thank you for being here!