October 2013 entry - The Mirror (Ireland-Erin)

[galdre]

Wow, impressive work.

[- Max -]

Thank you guys. I think I can call the first map done.

#LATEST WIP#

Irelandfinal.jpg

[Chashio]

Now that is just simply stunning. I am curious... What factors did you consider in choosing places to label?

[- Max -]

Thanks Chasio On this one I started with all cities/towns labels, placed on circled icon side. Then I put the counties labels and colored provinces labels. Since those ones are the harder to locate, I moved cities/towns labels when I had to, to make room for those labels. It's kind of building a puzzle, my main goal being not having labels overlapping one with each other (If I was able to avoid overlapping with other map elements I tried to do it but if not I let them overlap borders, rivers and this kind of stuff) Of course all of this is also impacted by lenght of names - and sometimes with odd personnal taste like : "hmm for some reason this label fits better here to my eyes. let's go" .
Then I added rivers labels, and finally all coastlines labels.

[Ilanthar]

Yep, wonderful ! Put it under glass and you could believe looking at an historical map !

by arsheesh
Yep, wonderful ! Put it under glass and you could believe looking at an historical map !

Indeed, I just remember having a look at the start... And one day later, you've done this map... Not all machine are so damn quick and even vampires are sleeping !

[- Max -]

Thanks Ilanthar!

Indeed, I just remember having a look at the start... And one day later, you've done this map... Not all machine are so damn quick and even vampires are sleeping !

Well Ireland is not that big!

[Chashio]

Cool! Thanks for the explanation you do such a nice job labeling, and there are so many labels, it's difficult to pick out everything that makes it work so well. I'll definitely be giving myself some labeling homework in the future. I know I downloaded a pdf on the subject at one point... buried in my hdd somewhere.

I have another part to my question now... mainly a curiosity because I have friends who live near Ballymena... and it's not on your map. Were towns like that too small (population-wise) or is it just that they would clutter up the more important places of note that you didn't include them?

[Sapiento]

Fantastic map, it really catches the feeling of an old-style map.

[- Max -]

Thanks Sap, glad to see I managed to hit my goal on this first map

Chasio, thanks, I always like labeling maps and this one was pretty fun to do. Concerning your latest question, I used some old 18th century maps as references and I could see that their accuracy about cities/towns (and geographic elements like coastlines or rivers for instance) was pretty "flexible" sometimes. So I wanted to keep that kind of thing on this map, therefore there's probably some towns missing or some small cities located while some bigger aren't on the map .

[- Max -]

Alright, time to take a look through the mirror, with the map of Erin. I'll go with a "naive" fantasy style to have contrast with the Ireland historical map. I started with basic textures, mountains and rivers.

Erin1.jpg