WIP - A Land Boundaried on the Easten Lacquerrian Sea

[Chashio]

Hoping for some style suggestions for the land parts. I have a few ideas, of course, but I'm wondering if you guys can come up with something more interesting... color scheme, content, technique... what would you like to see on a map of this place? And I'm also curious what use would you find for a map of this sort?

This is inktense pencils applied in dots and washes with a water brush. I picked up a pair of 9x12 XL watercolor pads yesterday evening and then spent about three hours dotting in the Sea and map edge border on page 1 of the first whilst listening to the Harry Potter 7.1 film on tv and innumerable boring advertisements. Sorry for the poor photo quality... phone camera.

wcBook - pg1 wip.jpg

[- Max -]

Why not giving a shot at a sand dunes desert? This beautiful blue calls an awesome yellow-ish desert

[Chashio]

Could do, could do... Certainly it would give me some immediate practice with something I've never tried in paint (excepting a large acrylic of some rather small grass dunes at Karekare beach) and haven't really got the hang of in any other medium either. And I'd probably have to get into more than one color in a stroke to paint them... so far the color picking in this map has been limited to just single choices. I've got like eight or nine pencils in the tin and the yellow just happens to be very lemony. Lemon glowing with the intensity of the sun. It's terrifying, really. haha Erm, any other suggestions?

[Lingon]

Really cool effect on the sea… it's got a very watery feel Not sure what sort of land would match it though; like Max my first thought was a desert. But maybe a large meadow with waves in the grass? (If you've seen some of Miyazaki's movies you'll have some great inspiration for that ) I think it has to be something wavy to fit the ocean… Curvy, soft mountain ranges, like those in your recent acrylic piece (you know, that ultra-awesome one), could look good too, though perhaps just a little sharper in style. Coastal meadow that fades into hills and mountains to the east?

[Chashio]

Good ideas. One of my thoughts for this one was to do some sort of painted illustration in a corner of the land (landscape/animals/? dependent on what type of place this map ends up being of), and maybe fade it into some looser terrain and map elements, and labels. Had open a book on Africa this morning and there was a beautiful foldout panorama of the savanna... the grass was all in golden yellow tones. I also did a scrap piece to test the power of the yellow pencil in a wash technique against blue dotted ocean... meh.

[Schwarzkreuz]

I would go with more decent colors. The sea is already so bright.

[Chashio]

I would go with more decent colors. The sea is already so bright.

That's the second time recently you've used the word 'bright' in description... Do you mean the colors are saturated? Vibrant? I happen to like color but anyway, with this one I'm aiming for something quite different than what is usually made on this site... lighter... though I still haven't decided upon specifically what to do with it. Have done a handful of scrap pieces to try to figure it out. It will in all probability have more vibrant colors by the time I'm finished with it. Feel free to squint or run away.

[Schwarzkreuz]

Yes, vibrant is more the word matching what I want to say.

Maybe only my Grim German taste for Darkness is blinded by bright vibrant colors

[Chashio]

What, no sunshiny yellow?

Tell you what, I will put a Dark schemed map on my to do list, my Grim German friend. In the meantime, however...