[WIP] Das emperyale Lvramion und umliegende Länder

[MetzgerWilli]

This is my first drawing and also my first project in GIMP (and any program for that matter). I am getting closer to the final version now. I am hoping to get some advice on how to proceed as well as some tips and suggestions if something irks you. I am also interested in how well the planet/space thing matches the map aesthetically or how I could improve it, as this is what I added most recently. I feel like I could also do a better job in giving the planets and its moons a more "round" feeling somehow? But I appreciate any kind of feedback and hope you enjoy the map!

Weltkarte141.jpg

To-do-List:
✓ finish coloring the oceans
✓ finish the few uncolored spots
✓ add regional labels (mostly finished)
✓ improve city label "readability"
✓ add a title, probably at the top, right of the space thing
✓ add some "overlay" to give the whole thing a more map-like feeling (I guess, I'll just have to try out options here)
✓ add a border
✓ figure out a fitting scale. So far I am thinking about making the distance between Grangold and Kompen (near the middle) around 100 miles. --> One "border slab" will equal 100 miles.
- Should be finished soon. Only minor details left to do.

The font used is called "Dumbledor".

Brushes used:
StarRaven's Sketchy Cartography Brushes - starraven.deviantart.com/art/S…
StarRaven's Calligraphic Cartography Brush - calthyechild.deviantart.com/ar…
I-A-Grafix's Hand-draw-map-brush- i-a-grafix.deviantart.com/art/…

Some info about the drawing:
I am making the map for a future DnD campaign of mine that I have been working on for a about a year now whenever I find myself some free time. As this is my first project, there will be variations in quality and style in different areas (and I came to delete practically all of my earlier efforts when my skill improved). For drawing the mountains, forests and villages I make great use of brushes I found on DeviantArt, and later started drawing and adding my own mountain ranges, cliffs, villages and vegetation.
The pegasus, unicorn, scorpion, the raven, the two ships and the maelstrom are cropped out from the maps of the Amiga games Amberstar and Ambermoon, both by Michael Hellmich. I wanted to add them and created the map around them, since these maps and the games they were about meant so much to me when I was a child. I did not get any permission for this, but hope it to be ignored/tolerated as I do not pursue any commercial intend in any form. The space pic is from NASA's site (www.jpl.nasa.gov/).

The title is German and means "Emperyal Lvramion (Loo-ra-me-on) and surrounding lands".

[Korash]

I LIKE!! Very much.

Nice use of color and scale for the objects. I think everything works well together, and had to read your text to know if this was all hand drawn or not. The shape of the coast line is really nice and after my own heart's desire when I draw mine.

I think the planets are okay...but might i suggest that you have the border between the space and land sort of fade into each other...a sort of "Here be Dragons and the Great Beyond" thing.

[MetzgerWilli]

Thank you very much!

To be clear, the planet is the one that the map is from, and not some end of the world thing. You can make out the overall shape of the map on it. I want to give a little feeling about what lies beyond the borders of this map (mostly desert in the west, ocean in the east, ice to the south and more jungle to the north while the mean looking land beyond the mountains is larger than you can see).

[ChickPea]

This is looking great, and all the better for being your first Gimp project. Well done!

If I had to nitpick, it would be with your labels. I think they're well done, but I feel the colour of them blends just a little too well. You need to zoom in quite a bit before you spot where they are, because there's little contrast with the background. This might be an artistic choice, in which case, go for it. But it might be worth trying something more vibrant just to see what it looks like.

I like the planet in the top left corner, and I figured out immediately that it was supposed to depict the map. That was a nice idea!

Also, for bent text, I do all my labelling in Inkscape, then export a PNG into Gimp. It's really easy to create curved text (and other text effects) in Inkscape. It's free software like Gimp, so worth a download at least, and there are tons of tutorials on the web showing exactly the kind of thing you want to do.

[MetzgerWilli]

Thanks for the feedback Chickpea . Some labels might be a little hard to read, aye. I would rather not make them any bigger, but I will see what I can do with the shadows I placed under the labels.

Sadly I couldn't do much work on the map recently, but I started utilizing Inkscape and it works great. I have a feeling that most good maps use different fonts for town and regional labels, so I am checking out good combinations at the moment.

Here is my progress on the map with a title:
Weltkarte142.jpg

I'll also add a quick doodle of a political map in case anyone is interested in this lore stuff.
Weltkarte142_Politisch.jpg

[ChickPea]

Looking good!

About your labels again, it wasn't so much the size I was meaning as the colour. I wondered what they'd look like in a different colour, or perhaps a more saturation version of the colour you have right now. Something that makes them 'pop' from the background.

I'm glad you're liking Inkscape. I love it. It's a joy to use for labelling!

About using different fonts for different areas, that's not always the case. It's often different styles of the same font. So, for instance, you might have regular case for towns, capital letters for important towns, italics for rivers etc. If you really want to read up on it, check out this post.

[snodsy]

Nice job, lots of work there. Think you've done a great job on the mountains, forest sea and the land color.

Don't really like the borders, they seem sketchy. Take a look at some other maps that demarcate areas, typically a hard edge that then has a outer glow or fade away, the hard edge give it a firm border. These look like overlays, colors are a little garish too.

The swamp area north of Luminor is really busy, the "grass marsh symbol" is too big.

Need some area, water, other labels. I agree with Chick, city labels get lost.

Legend surround box too big.

[MetzgerWilli]

Yeah, the borders map is just very temporary as I didn't want to finalize them before I finished labeling. The same goes for the box, was a quick way to add text. Great suggestion though, I'll definitely check out other political maps.

I'll look into adjusting the grass symbol in the swamps, it looks a little crowded indeed, especially in the big swamp.

[MetzgerWilli]

I darkened the background shadow of my city labels to make them stand out more. I think this goes in the right direction to make the labels more readable.
I also added a few regional labels and added the shadows to some of them (right side below the middle).

I doubled the length of the map to make it easier to work with curved labels (though this naturally increased the filesize significantly).

Attachment 77337

[ChickPea]

Not seeing any attachment :/