WIP: Political maps on Zarmina

[jshoer]

First work in progress post since joining the guild! Woohoo! I'm excited.

I produced this map of a habitable exoplanet a few years ago, and have been thinking of revisiting it for a while. The (physically plausible!) world is very different from our own, in a number of ways. I'll refer you to the other post for more details...

Anyway, what I want to do is zoom into a couple regions on the world and make more traditional fantasy-style political maps on the world, showing snapshots of the alien cultures on the planet. (Apparently, the astronomer who discovered Gliese 581g wanted to name it "Zarmina," after his wife. I will use one of the aliens' names for the world when I'm done. )

First things first: This map is HAND DRAWN.

Now that's out of the way...going from the previous map, I decided to trace it over and demarcate a few regions for details. Here's a picture of the layout so far. I traced the callout regions at a higher zoom level. They'll be the regions of interest for this project.

IMG_2292.JPG

My plan is to paint the outside-the-box regions, but not ink them to show any terrain features. That should make the callout regions really pop out of the completed map. I'm half tempted to do the painting now, just to make that happen!

The callout regions have funny orientations because the radial and circumferential directions are more important on this planet than rectilinear directions. A compass rose will be in the center, indicating the prograde (P, to the left on this map) and retrograde (R) directions. The other directions are...normal (N, upward) and antinormal (A), perhaps. Without sunrises and sunsets on this world, I fall back to orbit mechanics.

Before I get going in earnest, I'm considering two issues.

(1) What to do about labels. I'm not sure whether to label in English, or use some alien characters. I've a small library of alien characters I've used before, but I don't think coming up with glyphs is my best skill. I don't shy away from constructing languages at all.

(2) What style to use for drawing the mountains on this map. The planet only has one type of mountain: a volcano, which could be a Hawai'ian-style shield dome or a spatter cone like in the San Francisco field near Flagstaff, Arizona. The idea is that these mountains sit over a hotspot for a very long time, building a huge cone, and then after the hotspot dies down or the crust wanders away, erosion wears the volcano down. So we end up with U-shaped mountain "ranges," opening towards the direction of incoming wind or rainfall.

Here are some studies I've been doing for different mountain styles. It seems like the prevailing preference around this guild is for a particular style of pointy mountains with a clearly indicated ridge line in the center. That's not something I've done before, so I thought I'd play with it a bit:

IMG_2296_sm.JPG

A and B are basically the same style, but differ in whether I show shadows on the ridge line. C and D are really just experiments - I won't use them here, but I definitely want to keep them in my back pocket! E-H are variations on rocky peaks that align with the guild style. In I through N, I'm taking the various styles above and trying to adapt them into the peculiar range structures for this project.

I like K and M a lot, but I'm afraid they have too much perspective. Other than that, I think I'm on to something with L. I like I and J least.

I'll probably post periodic photos of the project as it comes along, as well as lots of these study images. Remember that I'm doing this by hand, so it's not so easy to tweak the opacity of a layer. But I do want to solicit input, so I'll keep posting my sketches before I move to the final map.

[jshoer]

Okay, here's a much more focused study for this project:

IMG_2299.JPG

I'm trying out styles for the forest (new style for me) and mountains (also new, based on L above) mainly. I'm also trying to make sure I can do everything I want at this size scale...I tend to work small, but this is not a lot of room to work with!

That little snippet would be an area towards the bottom left corner of the northeast - er, excuse me, retrograde-normal - cutout map.

[Bobemor]

Looks awesome so far!!

Perhaps Alien script with some/limited english translations?
Not to sure on what mountains, keep trying see what sticks?

[jshoer]

Okay. I think I'm getting somewhere for this world's mountain style. I duplicated the mountains from the study above to either side of it, in two styles.

IMG_2300.JPG

I think I'm going to use the outermost "bracket" mountains. My execution is better on the left than on the right! But I think I'm getting across the general form of these collapsed-volcanic-interior mountain ranges, and this should give me a lot of flexibility in terms of height, relief, etc.

Now, as for labels...I'm working up a little lexicon of words in a couple native languages to use on the map. I picked out three phoneme inventories so far and started making things up (going from a human anatomy, but eh...I'm not an exolinguist). I think I'm going to go with the Latin alphabet for lettering, though, as I would like people to be able to read the map without referring to a decoder ring.

For no particular reason, here are the phoneme inventories for the three languages:

Language ZNR1

consonants
p t k
f s h
m n ng

vowels
i u
a o

tones
rising, flat, falling

Language ZNR2

consonants
p b t d k g
f v s z
m n ng
j

vowels
i e u
a o

Language ZAP1

consonants
p t d k g
f s sh
n ng
w j

vowels
i u
a o
with dipthongs ai, au, ou, and ui

[Chick]

Those mountains are coming along real well

[a.coldyham]

Did someone say 'dipthongs'

[jshoer]

Update: Some coastlines and rivers inked in, a few mountains inked in. I'm a little annoyed at the topmost mountain pair.
IMG_2417.JPG

[jshoer]

I'm updating slowly.

I took a break from developing linework for the terrain features to come up with and place labels on the map. There are three independent languages so far, each with a unique phoneme inventory, a vocabulary constructed as I needed it, and a few syntactical rules. Once I was happy with the labels and script, I inked those in. I'll be doing linework around the labels. Here's the latest:
IMG_2535.JPG
Note for native English speakers: the script is mostly International Phonetic Alphabet, so parse 'j' as a consonant 'y.' The only deviation from IPA is 'sh' to denote the affricate as in the beginning of the English word "shoe," and 'ng' to denote the end of "sing." Also, the diacritics '/,' '\,' and '-' represent rising, falling, and flat tones in one of the languages.

I think I will be placing a few more cities and towns, and I need to compare to my original Zarmina map to remind myself where all the forests might need labels, but for the most part these are probably it.

[arsheesh]

Nice pen work. This is looking great.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

[jshoer]

Thank you; I'm glad you like it!