Hi, my name is July! I've been lurking on and off here on the forums for around 15 years under a couple of different user-names, but this is the first time in a long time time that I've posted something truly finished. I hope you'll enjoy!

This map was created for my homebrew fantasy setting of the same name. The Argent Sea setting is heavily inspired by the renaissance era Mediterranean.

The map itself draws inspiration from Italian portolan charts, Magnus' Carta Marina, and a variety of other historical sources.

I originally created this map completely with traditional media, but then decided to re-draw it digitally to make the image cleaner and easier to share. I re-created some of the line art in Adobe Illustrator, using an image-trace to pull in some of the more organic art elements and add to them with several new ones. I then took the line art into Photoshop for color and texturing. It was my goal throughout this process to mimic the style of a woodblock printed map that had been hand-colored, similar to many historical maps from the renaissance and later. I intentionally introduced mistakes, colored slightly outside of the lines, and used a variety of different brushes and altered opacities to give everything as realistic of a feel as I could. This is definitely the closest I've gotten digitally to a true hand-made style, and I'd love to hear what folks think of the result and if they have any suggestions for improving the process.

Click image for larger version.  Name: Argent Sea Distro.jpg  Views: 281  Size: 2.01 MB  ID: 135057

I've been posting about my process as I go over on the Cartographer's Guild Discord server, but if folks are interested enough I'd be happy to create a WIP thread with images of the original physical map and some of my interstitial files.