Hey all!

You haven't heard from me in quite a while, and that's because I'm in the middle of a large commission featuring 9 maps which I'll be happy to tell you about later (when the non-disclosure agreement period terminates). At the moment I managed to finish 7 of the maps already, and I'm having a little break while the client works hard to clear the necessary funds.

Since I'm on a break, I decided to go back to an entirely different kind of regional mapping. Not the hand-drawn style I applied in the Tentivu Tetrarchy and many others (such as my current commission), but the topographically slightly more authentic style I played around with for a while when I did my Aran & Ilan map. I decided it needed quite a bit more work for it to become really convincing, so off I went with a whacky test map. Below you can follow my progress up to this point.


  1. a really rough outline (no idea yet whether the "in" or the "out" would become the landmass)
    Krastvin_1.jpg
  2. the first level of detail ("in" will be the landmass, "out" will be the seas)
    Krastvin_2.jpg
  3. the final sketch (where I decided to rip apart the landmass in two separate continents)
    Krastvin_3.jpg
  4. and finally the detailed coastline.
    Krastvin_4.jpg
  5. I then started working on the DEM for the map, a process that would take a huge bunch of do's and redo's, until I finally arrived at a basic terrain map I kinda liked:
    Krastvin_5.jpg
  6. This map I eroded in Wilbur for hours and hours on end (starting over several times because man, that piece of software is HARD!!) until I got something that looked somewhat plausible:
    Krastvin_6.png


Which I took back to Photoshop for a ton of extra tweaks, a gradient map, a couple of shaded terrain layers and a bunch of ocean colour layers, which brought me to the current iteration:

### Latest WIP ###
Krastvin_7.jpg

It might look like a big step from #6 to the current version, but it really wasn't. The hardest work was getting from #5 to #6. Wilbur is a powerful beast, but to my unexperienced mind, keeping it in hand turned out to be an endeavour of epic proportions. Whew!