Work In progress - Corgarian
Hi everyone. New to the site, new to digital cartography.
I've been browsing the site for about a month and siphoning off little tricks and hints and stylistic elements to use in a project I've been working on. It seems only fair, since the work here has been so inspiring and helpful (especially the tutorials), to share my map in progress. Actually, I consider it fairly close to finished, but I'm still open to critiques and suggestions. Although, I'm not sure how many more embellishments I can add because the file has gotten to the point where it is taxing my limited hardware.
Anyway, before I post, a little background:
This map is created for a mod that is being created for a strategy computer game that has a rather complex story and a lot of original lore. I figured it'd be helpful to have a map to go with all that story. Knowing virtually nothing about digital cartography, I started by sketching the map out on a piece of paper, scanning it, and then turning it into a digital version that wouldn't (hopefully) be laughed at. The first few versions were quite laughable.So I started looking around for resources online to help do this kind of thing and I wound up (in a roundabout way, through Amazon of all places) finding this site.
What I'm showing below is my third or fourth iteration. It's done entirely in Inkscape and all the features (mountains, trees, etc.) are original, although I did use images I found on the web for inspiration. I do realize that some parts of this map may not be completely ... er ... geologically or climatologically kosher. This is due to the fact that much of the story was written before I started thinking about any kind of logical placement of events and locations, so the world's geography was created somewhat ad hoc. Still, I've tried my best to make everything as believable as possible.
The continent where the story takes place is called Corgarian. Please tell me what you think.
(PS, This is my first image uploading here, so I'm not sure what size to make it. If this is too low res, I can make a bigger version.)
Maybe it is the low resolution, but your labeling is hard to read. Putting a glow effect on it will help distinguish it. Your rivers seem to follow the rules, more or less. I would avoid changing fonts so many times. Don't be afraid to use different Tracking (spacing of letters) or curving the words to make it fit better. I love the style you have going here, and everything I have said is very nitpicky and very minor.
This cavern is below all, and is the foe of all. It is hatred, without exception. This cavern knows no philosophers; its dagger has never cut a pen. Its blackness has no connection with the sublime blackness of the inkstand. Never have the fingers of night which contract beneath this stifling ceiling, turned the leaves of a book nor unfolded a newspaper.
That looks really great, overall. The mountains and hills especially are a home-run. I'm less enthusiastic about your forests, although the color mix is good. I think I'm not liking them as much because they don't seem to conform to the same scale as the mountains; they poke up over the shoreline in several places and it's distracting. Geographically, the only place I'm not really sold on is the Drylands... with a big river cutting through it. Not to mention it's between a lake, a big sea, and another river to the north.
As Lalaithion said, the fonts are difficult to read. VERY difficult to read over the forests. Try uploading a bigger version; that might help.
Positives: Great looking landforms, your rivers are logical in layout, the border and compass look cool, and those mountains... *drool*
Last edited by Diamond; 03-20-2012 at 02:13 AM.
Hi again and thanks for some of the feedback.
Trees and forests: I'm not 100% sold on them either, but I haven't come up with a suitable alternative.
The river through the drylands - actually, the river is supposed to be a dry river bed through a deep canyon, but again I haven't come up with a good way to represent this on the map. It was easier to represent it as just a river, but I agree it seems strange the way it's represented at present.
I will futz with the text as suggested, but in the meantime here's a larger version of the same version of the map. I wanted to err on too small before because I didn't know if there was a size limit for files here. I can make it bigger still if necessary.
Very nice start. But you need to pay attention to your lighting. It was easy to miss in the small version, but you have the mountains lit from the West, but the hills from the East. Just look at which side is darker and make sure that all of your elements match(trees included when/if you replace these).
My Finished Maps
Works in Progress(or abandoned tests)
My Tutorials:
Explanation of Layer Masks in GIMP
How to create ISO Mountains in GIMP/PS using the Smudge tool
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Unless otherwise stated by me in the post, all work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
Is the name Corgarian set in stone for your map? It seems to me that a Corgarian would be someone from Corgaria. Anyway the map is looking good. I prefer more muted color tones, but the color theme you have goes together well. The land form and coast lines look real nice to me. About what scale is this map?
@jfrazierjr
Ugh, I hadn't even noticed that before. That's eye-rollingly annoying.
@Slylok
Re: the name. Not set in stone, and I thought of that as well. It will require going through and changing it to Corgaria throughout hundreds of pages of text, but I may go back and do that since now I'm not the only person it bothers.
Re: Scale. I envision this landmass as perhaps about the size of Western Europe. I suppose that it would help to have a scalebar.
Re: Color tones. I usually like more muted tones as well, but the computer game this project is related to has a bright color palette as does most of our other concept art, so in the interest of being consistent, I chose brighter colors for the map.
Ok, looks like I'm back to the drawing board for a while. The suggestions have been helpful! One question - earlier Lalathion warned against using too many fonts. I believe I have three here (four if you count the title font). Which one would you get rid of?
Last edited by Talon44; 03-20-2012 at 11:31 PM.
The red font is, for me, the hardest to read.
Also, use Find>Replace.
This cavern is below all, and is the foe of all. It is hatred, without exception. This cavern knows no philosophers; its dagger has never cut a pen. Its blackness has no connection with the sublime blackness of the inkstand. Never have the fingers of night which contract beneath this stifling ceiling, turned the leaves of a book nor unfolded a newspaper.
Yeah I see what you mean. Here was my issue: I have three political levels I'd like to signify on the map: country names (currently large bold font), town/city names (script font) and then the one nation, which is named "Kingdom of Holbark" in the map, has various provinces/duchies/earldoms/whatever, which I signified with the red font. I was afraid if I had another black font, the meaning might be lost. I actually had coats of arms for all of these as well, but I thought it was getting way to busy when I added those. Anyway, maybe all black font is the way to go? I'll try that in the next iteration.
Mixing different typefaces, and scripty typefaces in general, are bad. It makes the map look messy and hard to read. Ideally you want to use simple faces within a single family. You're using at least 4 completely different faces, and the clash. Other than the fairly heavy one, they are also all rather poor in terms of readabilty. Maps tend to be noisy environments for text, you need to keep your text simple and clear to compensate.
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