B/W Map of Noros handlettered map and timelapse video

[Tiana]

noros-watermarked.jpg
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Finished black and white digitally inked/painted maps for a novel.

Timelapse of the two maps for this series I made. This is for upcoming novel Gatewatch by Joshua Gillingham. In this video you'll see me working on 3 distinctly different map regions. I chickened out of doing a split perspective and just did two boxes (reason being, I was definitely not being paid enough for that kind of challenge). If I were hired to do it again for twice the money I'd try the split perspective shift I had imagined when I was first commissioned to do it, but I had to make time based decisions especially since I was handlettering the whole thing.

You'll see me bounce back and forth between a couple of programs; Other World Mapper is GREAT for what it does but limited to no raster creation functionality means I can't do any of my texture stacking, blurring, drawing, or hand lettering, so I have been taking to using it to create a vector base which I draw on top of. This saves me time if a client asks for a significant change to the base, since I don't have to go through dozens of steps to tweak it. While I have hopes the program will eventually be a one stop, at this point I can't do my illustrative options inside of it, so back and forth it is. Because of this, there are a couple of steps I missed recording, but I think they're self-explanatory... the main one is that, I brought in the second map and added a texture and flipped it to grayscale off-camera. I believe all I did was select an appropriate texture, set it to multiply, and removed the saturation and maybe tweaked the levels a bit. Easy to achieve without the video step by step.

I've tried to keep my screen capturing at a speed where people who are interested in my process can still make out what I'm doing.

Why hand letter, you might wonder? Yeah, sometimes I ask myself that too, when I'm halfway into it... but I've always been fascinated by hand-lettering in COMICS and on MAPS, so I started hand-lettering my old webcomic and it became a natural thing to try on maps when asked for "something that looks like it was made in world by this character and what they have available to them" or "an old fashioned style fantasy map like in print books"

I think I regret, a tiny bit, that I wasn't bold enough to try the split-perspective without a dividing box. I used to do comic panels with trick panels with no borders or weird borders, and really enjoyed the results, but I've never once applied that to mapping. My history as a comic artist is some of why I love Clip, I guess, because it has some amazing features for comic creators, such as the panel tool and the speech bubble tool and the speedlines tool, all of which I've never touched for a map.

Here's the video.

[Voolf]

Heavy strokes, that is some cool looking BW maps Tiana.
Thanks for sharing the video too. It's always interesing to see like others create stuff.

[Tiana]

Thanks, Voolf. I think they turned out okay. Yeah, there were a lot of strokes and I went heavy on some of them. I know that's not to everyone's taste. I am originally a comic artist and some of inking comics is using the weight of lines to indicate the shadow cast. Even though I know it's not to everyone's taste (I've seen users here complain that all lines should be uniform) I prefer to use this dynamic inking style reminiscent of brush inking rather than a set 5 pixel width for every mountain micron style ink. I could unify it... I just... don't WANT to... there's lots of people who draw tidy lines (like you) already. =P

The videos are made mostly so I can let people see how my progress works if they like my maps. And also because I find I learn a lot rewatching myself draw a map, I catch errors that way that I can fix in future maps since I can see how and why it ended up the way it did. My most recent black and white map is way better for the example of this map set, since I was able to observe how I assembled it and make tweaks.

Since I mentioned it, here's that other map. Thayria. It's simple but I really liked it. I applied what I learned about hand lettering from this project and the results are better in my mind. https://www.cartographersguild.com/s...870#post413870

[Voolf]

Oh, I did not ment it in a bad way or anything like that. I have seen some maps with various thickness lines and it can look really great.
It is obvious it won't be to everybody's liking. If you had some people in the past "complaining" about that, it is good you did not care too much.
Constuctive criticism is good, but we should not resign from something we like just because someone else doesn't .

[Tiana]

Yeah, but if it's clients you have to redo. >_> Though I must say this guy loved his map and had very little change to make, if he hires another map artist in the future they'll be lucky to work with such a great guy.

It's not necessarily bad to take into consideration... I wouldn't have ever ventured into doing lineart if I hadn't been heavily criticized for my original style being "too blurry". I still love and occasionally use that style but I do kind of regret that I let the criticism build up to a point where I stopped, because I was just starting to get good at it. I did digital painting, something that's now quite regularly seen, but when I started, was a newer art form most people didn't do, especially not in comics. While I don't think it was good that shame ended up pushing me to doing it I do think it's good I branched out from being a one-trick pony. I like to try challenge myself a little, even if I get cranky. I'm glad I learned to ink due to the critiques. I wish I hadn't let my old style fall to the wayside because of them. The trick is to take into consideration and not to heart, I guess. No sense in losing what you love about art, but it's a good thing to learn to improve too.

Also, I didn't think you meant it in a bad way. I was just inspired to talk about why I did my lines that way.