Newbie Coming to Learn at the Feet of the Masters!

[Henry Hyde]

Hi everyone,

I found the guild because of something I saw on Facebook a while back, and then found the Twitter account last week, where I had a bit of a chat with @CartoGuild who encouraged me to join up here – so here I am!

I've been messing around with maps for as long as I can remember, partly just for the sheer joy of making them, and partly because of my hobby: miniatures wargaming. As a keen student of military history, maps are obviously also a critical aspect of that!

I've been using pencil, pen, ink and watercolours for maps for years, including black ink on tracing paper for campaign maps that can be overlaid, but for the past decade I've also created battle scenario maps for the magazines I've edited. (I started a print magazine called Battlegames in 2006, which was taken over by another publisher in 2011 – complicated story – but they kept me on designing and editing the magazine, which then merged with Miniature Wargames in 2013. That was sold to a big publisher in 2015, and after realising I couldn't take any more, I quit as editor in September this year to be freelance again.)

I've had a book published (The Wargaming Compendium, Pen & Sword, 2013), and am working on follow-up for them (Wargaming Campaigns, due to be published 2017) which will involve a LOT of maps! I've also started writing fantasy and historical fiction, and obviously I need maps for those too... But I want to upskill and increase my style repertoire. Many of the maps I've seen in this place are simply breathtaking, so I'm keen to learn and push myself.

Almost all the maps I've done in recent years have been to tight deadlines.

Here are a few examples of my work up to now in various media and styles. The big maps relate to a completely fictitious campaign I've been running since the 1980s, in an imaginary 18th century world. The same goes for the detailed hex maps, of which there are a few lying around here somewhere! (Basically, when contact is made in a hex, I generate the terrain using die rolls and a bit of judgement.) I wrote all about my campaign system in Battlegames magazine, then in my book, and have also collated the articles into a cheap digital download called The Wars of the Faltenian Succession. If anyone here is interested in having a copy, let me know and I'll give Guild members a 50% discount.

incidentally, the 'stepped' hills in most of the battle maps are deliberate, mimicking the 'contour' hills used by many wargamers.

That'll do!

Looking forward to learning from you all.