December Entry: Garden

[VincentAlliath]

Well, I'm not too certain about the name, but I keep coming back to Gaidan, or Garden. For now, that's working for me.

I'm going for a somewhat simple atlas style with this one with a few little extra things that I want to try. The world itself is relatively far along, probably extremely late Earth-1800's... ish. The continent on the bottom right of the map will be mongolian-esque, what with nomads, horses, wolves... that sort of thing. The middle continent, as you can see, is inspired by the Americas.

The attached file is actually only half the size of the full piece. It's actually 8400x4000 pixels. I've resized it to 4200x2000 here, and it's at 95% quality (100% bumped it from 3MB to 6MB, roughly).

On the list of coming up to-dos are rivers, which I can't do without mountains, and I'm still trying to figure out how I want to do the mountains on the main continents. Anyway, enjoy!

[VincentAlliath]

I've done mountains and rivers (they're kinda low quality in this version, but I didn't feel like making thicker versions of each one just yet. Rest assured, the final version that I put up here WILL have nice rivers.

On the up-and-coming to do list: outlines of my major civilisation, my minor countries, and other little island nations.

After that, I can get started on settlement locations, HOORAY! Following that, road and trade paths are likely to come.

### Latest WIP ###

[VincentAlliath]

I've done borders for the continents themselves... They're placeholders for now until I find something that looks okay. The medium colour borders (on the red continent, blue continent, and green continent) are regions, like separate states. They kinda distract from the land routes, so I might put a nice glow around them or something. That's something for the final touch-ups, though.

Settlements and routes have been done for the red continent now, and I'm actually extremely happy with how the routes translated to the low-res version of the map.

To-do next: settlements and routes on the blue continent.

### Latest WIP ###

[VincentAlliath]

I've done all the settlements and routes for the blue continent now.

Next stop is the green continent.

[ravells]

Really nice looking colour choices, Vince. It's probably just me, but the landmass shapes seem a little horizontally stretched? I do like that embossed town symbol vibe - never seen it before.

[jtougas]

Very Nice !! (man did I pick the wrong challenge to get into.. )

[VincentAlliath]

Really nice looking colour choices, Vince. It's probably just me, but the landmass shapes seem a little horizontally stretched? I do like that embossed town symbol vibe - never seen it before.

Thanks guys. And the town symbols are simple work. Using the paintbrush tool in gimp, make a dot. Alpha to Selection on the layer and delete (it'll leave a little grey fading ring). Copy Visible and copy in. Bump Map it.

On the cities, I plan on adding a handle so it looks like a magnifying glass. I'm just THAT cool. (h)

[VincentAlliath]

Haven't had time for this, lately. Might finish it another time. Might now.