Fantasy map of Lanzarote

[rapatuan]

Hello,

This is a map I'm currently working on. It's a commission from a friend, and it is the island of Lanzarote in the Canary Islands, but with a fantasy twist. I still have to add a pirate ship, northwest of the island, two palm trees in the center of the island, mountains, all the lettering and some small details. I've gone to an ancient treasure map type, using the S.John Ross technique to represent the coastline.

Things I've done so far:
- Parchment texture using clouds, difference clouds and emboss
- ragged border using a mask, as learned watching 'zombienirvana' videos (can't remember the author's name)
- Landmass of the island handdrawn over a real map
- Improved coastline with Oldguy's method (Noise-Blur-Threshold-Fill & Paint)
- Created frontiers with a colored inner glow with (base colors with 25-50% saturation)
- Colored land and sea with natural, but muted colors
- Created some handrawn seamless textures and applied them to the land and sea
- Added a border and grid
- Added a title
- Added ocean's name
- Added some drawings

Hope you like it, and if you don't, I really hope you tell me why not!

Regards,

Antonio.

http://antonioazpitarte.blogspot.com/

[anstett]

I like this image as a travelers map of an island. My first thought was that each of the symbols represents something about the shaded area they are in. So I am left wondering what the other two areas symbols should be. I like the unknown quality of are those literal creatures to be encountered or more like heraldric symbols for tribes living there.

If you did add those other two symbols then I would shrink the existing ones just a bit for clarity.

BOB

[rdanhenry]

That's a nice start. You might want to mute the colors on those decorations just a bit, to better match the map parts of the map. Their placement is also a little strange, since they obscure the island when there is plenty of room at sea.

[rapatuan]

Thank you both for the comments. The main problem I have with the map is precisely the balance of the decorations. There are very few elements in the map, the three you see on the posted image and an image of two palm trees in the center, plus I have to move the wolf and the butterfly closer to the center, wich makes matter worse. The decorations are not associated with the shaded areas, unfortunately. I have something in mind to solve this, and it is to put the images onto some floating parchments over the sea, and link them to their respective places with thick hand drawn arrows. And yes, the colours must definitely be muted down, but since I'm not a very good colorist, I first begin with natural colors and when I've finished I fine tune with Hue-Saturation.

Thanks one more time.

[anstett]

If you have four images perhaps move them out to the four corners of the frame?

BOB

[rapatuan]

Yes, I'm going to move the decorations around, and since I don't feel comfortable with them floating on the map, I've put them on small pieces of paper and linked them to their places with dashed lines, like in a treasure map. I think it improves the overall balance of the image. Now I have to move the compass rose a little bit to the lower right, add mountains, paths and a couple of features. I've added more saturation to the land so I need to fine tune the boundaries to re-establish contrast.

[rapatuan]

Well, better late than never... I delivered the map to my friend but wasn't really happy with how it came together, so I'm retaken it now to try to finish it off and get happy with it.

Added some mountains, labeling on some cities (following my friend's indication, I know it's not balanced) and started to draw a pirate ship just to fill some empty space (I may end scaling it down a bit though), moved the compass a bit, toned down the illustrations and eliminated the arrows, although I'm not very sure of this last step as this may add a little movement to the drawing if done properly...

Pais de los suenyos3.jpg

[Aceanuu]

First post here, so perhaps my opinion isn't as useful as others, but on a whole I think it turned out really great. I particularly like how you handled the coastline with the fading black horizontal lines. Tasteful colors and appropriate hatching abound; Overall I think its pretty damn cohesive and works really well for what you are going for.