[WIP] The Kingdom of Enisti & Praetor

[patamei]

Hello friends,

Hot off the presses of my last post (The Kingdom of Daimeremos), I wanted to make this thread to track the progress of my next map. This isn't a formal tutorial, but I will share my process for those interested. Mods - if this should be a Blog instead please tell me to delete this and post there, I'm new so I'm not sure of the etiquette!

Years ago I made a map using a tutorial found on this very forum.



This original and very crude world map has been corrected innumerable times, but the base coast and general landmasses have guided every subsequent map I've made. In this project, I'm going to be working on updating the island of Enisti, in the west of the above map. This map is given in Equirectangular projection, which is not very true to the shape of the landmasses, since it distorts more dramatically in the horizontal direction the closer we get to the poles. Enisti is around 57-60 degrees North, so it definitely suffers from that.

By georeferencing the base map in QGIS, I can project the map in a more accurate way, and I chose Equidistant Conic. Centering the map on Enisti gives me a jumping off point:


We can see there are already a handful of topographical features to work with: a mountain range in the southeast; a single mountain in the northeast; some large lakes; a nice big river; and those lovely big lakes. Considering the position of Enisti in the world, and its distance from a tectonic fault, volcanic activity seems the most likely way the mountain ranges arose. It's also quite convenient as a realistic way of getting one large standalone peak in the north. Iceland is an obvious real-world parallel for the lonely volcanic island, so I'll be drawing a lot of inspiration from that topography. However, given Enisti is quite a bit further south, I won't be putting major ice caps on the island.

Importing the base map into GIMP, I can use the free select tool and zoom to start tracing the coasts. I like doing a rough sketch in GIMP before I break into tiles and hand-draw, because it helps me visualise the terrain, and gives me a good way of iterating into lower and lower detail while still keeping the big picture looking good.

The first pass of the coastal tracing looks like this:
Attachment 128923