Hello to everyone! I’m Faxfire, and I’m glad I stumbled upon this forum—someone recommended it in a recent ENWorld thread as a great community for aspiring cartographers.

As some background, I’ve always loved cartography as a viewer, and event did some regional maps hand drawn in notebooks for my own fantasy world idea as a kid (maybe I’ll dig those out and scan them to post at some point. It’s only in the last couple years that I realized that I enjoy drawing and cartography as a creative outlet, primarily as a support for my parallel TTRPG and writing hobby. So while I have no formal training, I’m grateful to be here and for the great tutorial resources that the guild has. I’ve been using about three functions in the GIMP to edit my hand drawn scans, so I look forward to enriching my editing and digital drawing capabilities.

I’ve primarily focused on small area drawings, mostly dungeons, caves, and structures. For those I want to work on improving my drawing and adding novel elements to them, along with improving my layouts. I’ve recently done a regional map for a friend, and my first ever basic hex map. I want to improve stylistic elements and symbols as I continue drawing those types of maps, and I appreciate the great examples to draw inspiration from available here. Finally, I have a continent map in progress, which I’ve been struggling with for several months. I hope to refine some of the techniques in my regional studies to add interesting and realistic features to that map, and capture everything i want to in that project.

My posting may be intermittent due to lots of life commitments—like everyone here—but I’m excited to join the community and hope to be a fairly active contributor and learner from the very talented folks here. My greatest aspiration would to be able to someday see my work in a book or product, so any advice or help along that journey is especially appreciated! Thanks all!