CAgrippa

As noted in the New Members area, I am new to cartography, but am working on a fairly large and elaborate set of maps and pieces for a complex fantasy world of my design. Many years ago, I started to put a map like this together, by brute force: I scanned a set of maps from the Atlas of Imaginary Places (all one style, and nice), removed all the place names and some other elements, and then glued them together. That was fine, but pretty crude, and lots of things weren't just as I wanted them. Well now, it's time to get serious, and I find myself with a fair bit of time on my hands... and I LOVE maps.

The basic background is significant, I guess, since this blog will be essentially work-in-progress stuff.

The main area is about 1/2 hemisphere (1 demisphere?), half of the Southern Hemisphere. I am not terribly worried to calculate stuff like this accurately, but the notion is that the planet's eccentricity, angle, and so on ensure that most of the equatorial band is simply too hot, while most of the southern polar region is no less habitable than, say, Fairbanks, Alaska. Everything centers around the Great Circle Sea, in part because the big continents to the west and east are bounded on the south by huge cliffs carved by the moving sea, and (not surprisingly) it is extremely difficult to navigate outside.

The far south, Remia, has climate and such ranging from say southern Scotland to northern Finland. The northernmost regions are known as the Burning Lands, because they're basically super-hot jungles where nobody does very well. Then you have big continent-masses Mondar and Sinar west and east, and a scattering of islands and archipelagoes in the middle.... dominated by Krift.

Krift is a large island, about the size of Ireland, with a huge lake in it caused by an ancient meteor-strike. But because it's volcanic, a bizarre but (I am told) theoretically-possible phenomenon has taken place: the lake is fresh water, and the outer edges of the volcano down by the sea are thickly crusted with salt from the boil-off.

Politics and whatnot are very complicated, of course, but at the moment I won't get into that.

In the New Members forum, I posted an old-style political map of a portion of the southeast, including Krift and southern Sinar (including Gerran and Elith, usually now Gerran'El in common parlance).

I am now working on 2 maps:

1) A whole-world (or rather, demisphere) map in an attractive "classic fantasy" style, a la RobA's tutorials for GIMP. I will try to shade that map a little more toward a severe, less warm-grass-and-blue-seas kind of vibe.

2) A city-map of the Magehold of Krift (the dominant -- and very large city -- on Krift, beside the lake), with an inset of the whole island; I am currently shooting for a style reminiscent of Max's Yphyrion, though I may give up [still: it's setting the bar high that makes you work hard, right?].

I am working with both CC3 and GIMP, and find both excellent for their very different purposes. Obviously, because CC3 is vector, you can select an area and render it down with perfect accuracy; this makes me think that I'll select areas in my main CC3 map, render them out, and then polish with GIMP. But I have yet to settle into an efficient work process.