My First Mapping Project

[tjbuege]

Ok, I've been encouraged to post some work. This is my first attempt at a mapping project using Illustrator and Photoshop. I will be starting up an RPG with my kids soon, and it would be nice ... no, necessary ... to have some maps to go on. I have a rough idea what I want the region to look like. The campaign won't depend a lot on what the world looks like at first, so some of the details will be filled in later.

I've always liked the large rough central inland lakes dominating the landscape, so I decided to start with that theme. I spent some time searching Google Earth for an appropriate lake to copy/emulate, and I found one in New Zealand that I think is perfect.

I did a screen capture of the lake, pulled it into Illustrator, and using the Pen tool, outlined it. Once that was done, I added a couple rivers, filled it, and saved it out as a jpg. I will pull this into Photoshop as the basis of my map. Note, I rotated the lake a bit, to my liking.

I haven't decided what the final map will look like yet. This will be a learning experience. Comments are welcome and wanted.

-Tim

Lake.jpg

[AlexSchacher]

Wow that's cool, I love the shape. I don't have much to add though. Can't wait to see the landscape around the lake!

[FallenImmortal]

It's looking pretty good so far. The jagged edges are a good, realistic touch. Do you know what your scale is? Would this be a fairly small region or something hundreds of kilometres?

[tjbuege]

It's looking pretty good so far. The jagged edges are a good, realistic touch. Do you know what your scale is? Would this be a fairly small region or something hundreds of kilometres?

Thanks! Realistic? I hope so, it's a real world lake. The actual lake (Lake Waikaremoana in New Zealand's N. Island) is about 10 miles from end to end. I was thinking of scaling that up 10x - 15x, so about 100-150 miles from end to end. I don't want my PCs to be able to walk around it in a day.

Lake Waikaremoana.JPG

I've been tossing rough ideas down on "paper" (illustrator), and my thoughts are along these lines:

Campaign Area.JPG

This is a close up of the lower right portion of the lake (when rotated approximately 45 degrees to the right). I want it to take a day or two for my PCs to get from town to the ruins. So it should be 30-40 miles from Mosport to the River by the mountains.

[tjbuege]

I've been trying to learn some texturing techniques. Looking for an old parchment feel. Here's a sample of what I've come up with so far. This is still very rough. For one thing, the lake will be an outline, with interior offset lines for "waves". That and other content adjustments will come later. I'm just trying to get a feel for what I want the map to look like.

Parchment Sample.jpg

I'm using the technique linked to in this thread.

Your thoughts or suggestions?

-Tim