Isle of Runa unofficial Lite Challenge entry & a small review of Affinity Designer
I'm not able to enter the Lite Challenge any more, but Bogie kindly consented to me stealing one of his island layouts so that I could take part unofficially.
I bought Affinity Designer a couple of months back but I've been so busy I haven't had time for mapping and had barely used it. I was determined to give it a serious workout, so I've been working with it for the last week to make this map.
I do a lot of vector (in Inkscape) to compensate for my lack of drawing skills, then I usually finish up in Gimp. There's a lot of exporting/importing PNGs between the two, which isn't a huge hassle, but I love that I can do it all in the one program with Affinity Designer. It has its vector 'persona' (as they call it) which works like most vector-y software with paths & objects etc. But then you can switch to the 'pixel persona' and create raster layers, where you can draw/paint much the same as you would in PS or Gimp. Obviously the pixel layers won't scale without loss of quality the way the vector layers will, but that wasn't an issue for me. There are some things that Inkscape does better (like Pattern along Path), but Designer supports SVG so it was easy to create in Inkscape then open the SVG in Designer (I did that in this map with something moderately complicated, and didn't have any compatibility issues.) The brush system seems decent enough - to me - though how it compares to something like PS, I don't know (I'm not certain if it's the same brush system in Affinity Designer as Affinity Photo - it could well be). For shading mountains and ground terrain, it was more than adequate. It comes with a relatively limited number of brushes, but people in the Affinity Forums have made and shared a load of them, particularly texture brushes. The software's also got masks, layer blend modes, layer effects, adjustments etc. Curving text along a path was a skoosh.
For the way I work, Designer's fantastic and suits me perfectly, and I'm well pleased. I just wish it worked in Linux, but maybe it'll open via Wine at some point down the line.
Anyway, the map...! I won't have much time over the next week (my sis is getting married next weekend!) and I wanted to get it finished and out the way, so here it is. I think I would do something different with the forests if I was doing it again, but mostly I'm happy with how it turned out, considering I spent less than a week on it and was wrestling with new software.
map2.jpg
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The coat of arms in particular looks great.
