Welcome!
The Cartographers’ Guild is a forum created by and for map makers and aficionados, a place where every aspect of cartography can be admired, examined, learned, and discussed. Our membership consists of professional designers and artists, hobbyists, and amateurs—all are welcome to join and participate in the quest for cartographic skill and knowledge.
Although we specialize in maps of fictional realms, as commonly used in both novels and games (both tabletop and role-playing), many Guild members are also proficient in historical and contemporary maps. Likewise, we specialize in computer-assisted cartography (such as with GIMP, Adobe apps, Campaign Cartographer, Dundjinni, etc.), although many members here also have interest in maps drafted by hand.
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Right, its a New Year, and the first month has nearly gone already. I've updated my Profantasy programmes and dusted off my old campaign, warmed up photoshop and re-read several pdfs on doing decent mountains, some of which look fairly good. I am going to look forward to experimenting and creating some new maps for my world . In the past year my roleplaying group has grown steadily and we have a good core of gamers who meet up every week in the local scout hut. I therefore ...
My first blog is about styling. It can be time consumming finding fonts and photoshop brushes, colours and styles in map making. But the effort is truely worth the while even if it means rehashing existing maps. I use some fonts which don't have the full character set so that numbers, for example, don't come out in text. What a pain! And being a poor artist I can't afford to buy pro fonts. I have tried to make my own font up and it took ages! And when you use it it is damn hard to read as the spacing ...