Regional Fantasy Color Map: Looking for Opinions/Critiques/Suggestions
Ladies and gents, this is a color version of a commissioned piece I made for Palladium Books. At this point, all the necessary elements are in place. I'd appreciate some critiques on my technique.
I have a minor color vision impairment that can sometimes give me trouble in making color maps, so I'd be particularly interested in your take on the colors, gradients, and textures. I'm particularly concerned with the national borders; they need to be clear, but not garish.
Note: The "Kadriel" region is an enchanted land of eternal autumn/harvest, and it's dominated by trees with bright red/yellow leaves, so the coloring there is deliberate (I'm not totally colorblind).
Last edited by Coriolis; 03-23-2015 at 09:52 AM.
That's a very nice map, and I think that the colours work very well in this context.
The problem that I have with this map is what I see as a misplaced focus rather than the colour scheme.
The map is titled: "The Island Kingdom of Bizantium", but the red colour of the border as well as the font size seem to place the focus on "Kiridin" instead.
You might try to simply swap the yellow and red border colours, and reduce the size of the "Kiridin" label.
That's very helpful, thanks! I put the yellow in Bizantium because they're big on trade, so a gold-ish color seemed appropriate, but I agree, the red pops out more. I could lessen the opacity of the red, swap the colors, or use different colors entirely, like orange and purple or something.
I'm not sure what to do about the Kiridin font size; that label needs to cross multiple regions, and Kiridin is a big land that takes up a lot of space on the map. I'll think on that.
You can play around with the spacing of the labels. It's a good way to fit the labels into the corresponding space.Originally Posted by Coriolis
What about extending the vertical space of the canvas to help center the island more, draw the viewer's eye to it? You could put your title and key, etc along the top that way too, help it from being all cramped into that corner.
The dimensions and scope of the map were driven by the customer. I could shift it slightly upwards, but that would encroach on some of the colonies, which are an important part of the map. In any case, I'd rather not have to re-do all the geography from scratch. "Perfection is the enemy of good enough", as a great professor of mine likes to say. I could achieve a similar effect by expanding the image with a border and placing the title in an extra-thick top border, but that would change the image's overall proportions.
I'll think on it more tomorrow. You've both given me some good points to ponder about planning out how I focus the subject of my next map. Thanks!
That's what I meant. Don't change any placement/art/etc, just extend the top of the canvas. You're right, it would change the proportions, but it might balance the whole thing out...
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