Kinebrach Verymensis
It's a map. Probably.
EDIT:
Seems like there's more things that could be said about this map. Well, alright, then...
The map is your standard Daelin-ish fare. The universe is another of my weird concoctions, but just like every other map I do, the lore aspect is entirely WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get), so beyond the names and crazy esoteric descriptions, I know nothing about this world. I do have vast amounts of nebulous reflections on what each of the nations are like in terms of government and culture and whatnot, but nothing concrete. Like I've said before, I just like to make up silly names for places. Though, I guess you could infer from the railways that the world is somewhere around the early industrial age, in terms of technology. I'm really trying to avoid labeling it steampunk, but heck, that's what it is, really. But also, there's magic! Probably.
For those interested in tips on technique, here's an abbreviated run-through of how I made the map:
The mountains are made by rehashing a technique I've used before, which is to take an already existing relief map (in this case, a2area's cool bump-map for his Torentine project, so kudos to that dude!), then cut and paste from that to my heart's desire. Then I set that layer to multiply, and beneath that I draw "emphasis" by basically painting an 0% fill layer with an added bevel & emboss layer style with a 10-20% opacity brush, adding a light and shadow side to the relief map, thus hopefully achieving the look of the mountains "rising from the ground", as it were.
The forests are also a Daelin oldie-but-goldie. Two layers, each with a bevel & emboss layer style, and a brush set to a high spacing and scatter, so that I'm essentially drawing with a smattering of small randomly placed dots. That gives it a "random" but still controllable effect on the placement of the brush strokes. The reason of the dual layers is to, again, add a "rising from the ground" effect, and also to add variation to the texture and color of the forests. With these forests, I played around with some gradients to add to the flow of the tree colors.
With most of my maps, it's a toss-up if I can be bothered to do rivers, because I put so much other stuff in my maps when it comes to flags/emblems and labeling, so the map can easily get too busy. With this one, I decided to forego the rivers. I didn't do coloring of the terrain either, because, honestly, I haven't found a technique for doing that, that I am fully comfortable with yet, and also because I generally like the bone-white look of the land in contrast with the green-blue sea.
I see a few of you appreciating the coastlines. Thanks for that! I actually really dig the coastlines too, and the funny thing is, they sort of happened by accident, as well. Like I've said before, I don't really know how to draw in hand, either with an actual pencil, or a PC tablet. All the drawing I do in Photoshop is done by mouse. So I often play around with "automated" ways of doing things, and the coastlines in this map are in fact "automated", and really easy to do, too: Select the "base land" layer -> Expand selection (you can play around with the specific pixel count, but I chose 2px) -> In PS, there is an option to convert a selection to a path, called Make Work Path, found in the Path tab (again you can play around with the tolerance setting, but I chose 1,0px) -> Convert the created path into a shape; this will allow you to add a stroke effect to the shape -> Add a stroke, and then, in the Stroke settings, make the stroke a dashed line (Once again, you can play around with the dash/gap settings) -> Repeat this procedure X more times, only slightly increasing the expanding of the initial selection by Y number of pixels, and changing the dash/gap settings of the resulting stroke; this way, you should hopefully get a set of incrementally expanding dashed rings around your landmasses -> Finally, play around with the color of those rings so that they match the color of your water and maybe blur the stroke a tiny but so they almost dissolve into each other. This technique works especially well if you also add an outer glow effect on the base land layer beneath the dashed lines, to emphasize the "surf" feel of the coastlines even more. And there, boom, presto, neat-looking coastlines, without making even a single brush stroke!
Okay, so anything else? Oh, right, the corner illustrations! Well, I'm not going to pretend I did those all by my little self. The originals were definitely pilfered from online resources, but then heavily reworked with colors and textures and retouchings and whatnot. Yeah, that's also a large part of how I make my maps.
Also, I've been trying to select my best maps that I want to have made into metal posters on the webshop displate.com, and it looks like I've found a new candidate with this map, because I really dig this map a lot. I think it turned out pretty neat, even though I didn't have a lot of confidence in it to begin with. But perseverance, and just playing around with Photoshop a bunch, seems to have netted a somewhat decent result.
Anyway...
Kinebrach-Verymensis.jpg
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