Just finished: "The Scientik Age"

[jshoer]

The last map I posted is from a backlog that I will eventually get all up in the forum - sneak peak in my gallery - but this one, I just finished! I've been working on it, off-and-on, for what seems like a couple years. This one is very different from "Legends." It is particularly...fanciful.

HexForPub.jpg

The culture of this world is having a bit of a renaissance: they are discovering frontiers of architecture, science, commerce, and engineering. The terrain of rolling hills gives way to basaltic columns - which the cartographer emphasizes, likely beyond plausibility, as an artifact of this renaissance. Those columns shape the flow of nearby waterways. Scattered around the region are representations of monuments and landmarks: the White Palace, the Water-Whele, the Observatorie, the Derrick, the Beacone.

I've had this idea lodged in my head for a while, to do a map along the lines of, oh, every hexagon-dominated sci-fi map ever. I wanted to caricature the Giant's Causeway, and I had the goal of using the hexagonal columns to play with the flow of water. That turns out to be only a minor feature of this map, playing second fiddle to the color. I'm particularly happy with the color blending I got in the peninsula just below center-left. The labels are something I've done before, incoherent scribbles that try to give the impression of glyphs, but pushed further than I've done before to include bullet lists and parenthetical notes.

My tripod broke, and this one had a lot of warping when I painted it, so there are some blur and focus issues with the image. If I can get a better picture, I'll post it.

I can already anticipate some of the things you will probably note about this map. But I'll let you do it yourselves!

[arsheesh]

Interesting concept for a map. I like it

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

[Corilliant]

Hey, I thought it looked like the Giant's Causeway
That's a very nice map. Have some rep.

I guess one thing to point out is the funny movement of water. But I'm not sure how you would change that.

[Sapiento]

Unusual but interesting concept.

[ChickPea]

I love the feel of this map, and the sense of a story behind it. Also, your hills look great.

[Chashio]

Ha! This is wonderful The hills are beautiful with the soft gradation of tones, and I love your little pen-scratched notes... I can imagine the cartographer hunched over his desk working on this and mumbling to himself. I sort of wish there was a title and/or neat line to finish it off, but it's all so happily fanciful that I almost missed that they're missing. Nicely done, overall. Did you paint this with watercolor or ink or ?

[karamane]

Really interesting map!

[jshoer]

Thanks for the kind words, everyone.

Chashio, I painted this with watercolor pencils. So some of the original pencil texture shows through, but mostly the color gets painted and blended by brush. I had to be more careful on the hills to preserve the color shading.