Time for an update again.

After a christmas break I have continued with my project. Quite many things have happened since. Firstly, I tested styles for the city symbols and tried to find objects which would have a hole of the right size, so I could draw many small symbols of same size. I found three good different-sized round holes, but not a square one. So, the square cities are drawn with just a ruler, and some of them, to my annoyance, are not exact squares. With the big cities I decided to go with a hachured area. Locations for the hachured cities, square cities and biggest circle towns were copied from my old maps. After that, I started to fill the map with small towns and villages. I did quite many of them, I hope I won't regret it later.

Before christmas I also purchased a sepia-coloured Copic multiliner for the contours. It seemed to work well, so I redraw all the contours with it and erased the pencil lines. It looks so much better without the pencil lines, which were already fading away in some parts. The map looks quite nice as a black-brown-white map, but the contours will be less visible in the end when it's coloured. However,some of the pencil lines are quite impossible to erase after so much erasing and redrawing earlier. If I had known in the first place that I’m going to erase all the lines, I would have used a softer pencil.

Another thing, I draw the borders between the countries. That came up quite nicely. The borders are not very striking now but they will have a red buffer in the end. I also tested my new Koi watercolor pens more for the elevation and I think I know what colours I will use.

The next step is adding the roads and railroads, can’t wait to draw them! After that comes probably the most time-consuming part: the naming and lettering. Coining all the names is not a problem, but writing them all somehow to the map with a satisfying result will be slow. I haven’t counted, but I think I have about 400 - 500 features to name.

Below as attachment are a scan and a photograph.

As earlier, all comments and criticism are welcome!

scan2.jpg

pic3.jpg