So here, finally, is my finished map of Linlandia in a hand drawn style.

linland hand final1.jpg

The story of Linlandia revolves around the war between Humans and Orcs. They had been co-existing in Voltan Valley with only minor skirmishes between the two until the ascension of the Black Orc warlord Nar. He assembled a massive Orc and Goblin horde to wreck the wrath of Gruumsh upon the puny humans. The humans were championed by Bellin Linson and the Mage Belwastenard. In the ensuing battle the Orcs were driven from the field and foundations laid for the city of Neuvoltan and the League of Volkstadt. To quote from the Chronicle of Linlandia: “the humans stole victory from its rightful owners by magic and missle, not the Goblinoid way, by strength of arm and iron.”

This map picks up after 11 years of expansion by the two sides. Nar has begun his first incursions into the League by a surprise forced march to capture the village of Waldorf. The setting is Warhammer Fantasy and it was created with the original Mighty Empires cardboard tiles.

I followed Gidde's tutorial here. All the brushes are Gidde's except for the town icons which are Starraven's. From RobA I used the the displace map filter technique for the ink bleed. For the rhumb lines I used Gidde's xcf file, the compass was a combination of SambrookJM's Compass2 script and Gfig. And finally the heraldry was from bits of Juggernaut's collection. Oh yeah and I got inspired by Quabbe to add the coastal rings.

The fonts used were Viner Hand ITC (towns, legend labels and Compass), Tempus Sans ITC (physical features), Rotunda (country labels) and Proclamate Incised (legend dedication).

This map was made mostly with GIMP, using Inkscape to make the labels for the map. For the Legend all the text was made using GIMP's text tool. Inkscape was also used to trace paths over Juggernaut's Heraldry gif's and convert them into png's. (Still working on the full set.)

A few lessons learned.

1.Further subdivide text by font size. I only divided it by font (use).
2.Keep embellishments to font in a separate layer. I had originally added all kinds of stroke and glow in Inkscape and it just got too muddled when I needed to apply filters to the text.
3.Work on complicated elements in a separate file and then copy and paste them in. Seems logical but you'd be surprised at how far you'll go down the rabbit hole before you realize this. The Legend was completely separate and then used Copy Visible and Paste into flattened map image.
4.Remember that Displace Map only works on a Layer that is the same size as the image.
5.Remember that merging layers sets them back to default Layer Mode (Normal), so you might need to take note of what they are before you start merging.
6.Copy Visible and Create New from Clipboard are your friends.

Thanks to everyone for the C&C's. I tried to incorporate all of your suggestions, especially about the legibility of the feature labels. I now hope to improve my Finished Map to post ratio. (1/100+ at the moment.)

Feel free to ask any questions about how I did things. I should be able to remember for a day or two.