Oligarchy of Lak-Yosh

[djan]

This is my first post here (I'll introduce myself below) and my first serious mapping attempt. It's not perfect but I am not unhappy with it. It is not completely finished; especially labelling is missing and the grassy planes around the rivers need some more details. I mainly used some of the tutorials by Jonathan Robert (fantasticmaps.com) when making the map.

It is a map for a current adventure I am running. It is set high up in the maintains in a region known for its tea plantations. All comments are appreciated, but there are some specific point for which I hope to get some suggestions.

• I am not completely happy with the mountains. These are meant to be seriously sharp peaks. To me they feel to much 'plateau-y'/stepped (especially the maps on the right). Do you have any suggestions to improve this, or perhaps some good examples?

• The slopes of the valley on the bottom-right are meant to be quite steep (30-45 degree slope). I tried to emphasize this using shading. Perhaps not enough, as the valley seems quite flat to me. Any suggestions for that?
  

There are some issues with scaling and different levels of detail in the map. The bottom-right part of the map was done with pen on paper. The city was drawn later in the Gimp. The level of detail and the scales don't match. This is something I have to pay more attention to in my next map.

About me: I am a statistical researcher with little experience in cartography. But I do enjoy drawing and map making seems an enjoyable and useful excuse to draw more. I have some experience in creating interactive data visualisations, so I might look into creating some interactive fantasy maps.

kaart.jpg

[Josiah VE]

Welcome to the Guild Djan!

I also started out using that tutorial, but I must say, this is much better than when I did it. I love how this is a bit of a regional map but yet at the same time a city map.

The orchards (or tea plantations?) look really nice.

Excellent job!

[Diamond]

That looks pretty darn cool. I get more of a sense of depth on the peaks from the thumbnail; for some reason at normal resolution it loses some of that. Not sure why, though. Maybe darker colors and more contrast between light and shadow would help?

Anyway, nice work and welcome to the Guild.

[snodsy]

Really nicely done, the shading is really good, maybe your linework isn't dominate enough to create the steep terrain, the lines are loose and sketchy and don't hold "weight", so the shading has to do all the work. I'm sure other will give some good suggestions too, but that's my input. Again, I really like the layout, city and elements.

[djan]

Thank you all for your comments. I made some quick sketches using your suggestions.

First I did a quick and rough increase of the shading/highlighting.

kaart_darker.jpg

I think this works well. When darkening some of the regions even more the map ended up too dark.

I also tried to increase the line thickness in part of the drawing (bottom right). This was done quite roughly, but should be ok to get the idea. Using the magic wand selection tool, I selected the background in the line art layer, inverted the selection and grew the selection by 2 pixels. Is there a better trick for this?

kaart_thicker_linework.jpg

@snodsy: Is this what you meant? I feel that the line work becomes too thick, especially compared to the detail in, for example, the city. When zoomed out I does enhance the line work.

[Josiah VE]

Those new shadows worked really well, now it feels like a deep valley, with the town waaay down there. Looks really awesome.

I think the main path could do with being a bit thinner, right now it's really thick compared to the town..

[snodsy]

Not maybe thicker, but more defined, not so broken, more continuous ridge lines?

[djan]

Created a new version with less thick roads as suggested by Josiah. Looks much better. I am also experimenting with the labelling but haven't been able to find anything I am happy with yet. I run into the issue that for the darker areas I would need to use light coloured labels and for the lighter areas darker coloured labels to keep the readable. However, I would prefer the labels to have the same colour. I also have been looking at placing the labels in the margin.

kaart_smaller_lines.jpg

[jshoer]

Hey, this is great! I'm getting the same sense as Diamond, that the mountains have more definition in the thumbnail than at full size. Maybe another way to tackle the problem would be to add lots of thinner and/or more transparent lines between the dark, black "major" lines defining the mountains. The purpose of the lighter set would be more to provide shading and relief than to indicate where the mountains actually are, so you can probably get away with something very subtle. Maybe do one mountain in a new layer and play with the layer settings for a bit?

Welcome!