The City of Altar -Hand drawn WIP
Hi! I'm a new mapmaker with absolutely 0 technical know how but eager to learn. I was wondering if there are other mappers who hand draw them scan in to clean up/ color. I'm quite proud of the work I've done but . . . Dismayed at the muddy looking paper and puddles of white out.
Going forward, what tools should I be looking to invest in?
Hi there, Isc1027!
I'm also new to the world of map-making, but I have lots of experience working with digital artwork in GIMP, which is a free open source art suite, et al. There's lots of things you can do to clean up artwork that's hand drawn and scanned in like this. For example, this is your image after I opened it up in GIMP on my end, and applied a denoising filter, adjusted color levels and contrast, and also used a 25 hardness brush to get rid of a few of the more stubborn smudges:
PXL_20210611_004225657-01.jpeg
So you can definitely learn to do it too! Now having said that, you're asking what tools you should invest into learning. That's a tough question, because everyone has a bunch of different tools that they themselves use and recommend. I would say it's probably more important to pick a sufficiently sophisticated tool and then really learn to use that tool as well as you can. Having one powerful application that you know extremely well is often much better than having a bunch of different tools that you don't know as well.
Let's see here... so, I ended up choosing GIMP, and I got really good at it. But keep in mind that whatever is your "main" tool, well... the weaknesses of your main tool will become your weaknesses, lol. For example, with GIMP, vector art is doable, but GIMP's vector editing functionality is much worse compared to something like Inkscape. In my case, it worked out well enough because I prioritize general purpose artwork processing over vector art, but for something like maps, Inkscape likely has some features that GIMP can't compete with. Of course, that's not to say that you can't make amazing maps in GIMP/Krita, et al. It all just depends on what you want to be easy and what you want to be hard, I guess.
Sorry if this adds more confusion instead of answers, haha. It's tough giving specific recommendations for questions like this.
The variety of building is immense, looks good so far. You can tell where the low income areas are as opposed to the wealthy, but what I think is lacking currently is a definition of main roads and entry/exit points at the gates. I think color could alleviate that fully though, this would be striking with watercolor.
IR
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