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Looking at it again I don't know how I thought all those were single buildings, because those would be very giant buildings (especially compared to the castle up to the right). Keep it up!
Thanks for the tips and praise.
The tiny red dots near the temples are statues of the deities the nearby temples are dedicated to.
The black slightly larger dots on the open market squares are wells for the water supply.
Here's an update of the map. Added some suburbs but I'm not sure about the area in the north. It should be a cattle market.
Stil need to label it though.
Serain 3167 WIP8.jpg
So here's another update of the map.
I think about using some textures for the fields and the planned wood in the northeastern corner, but I'm not sure yet which I should use.
Also I'm wondering if black is really the right thing for the built up areas. Recoloring would be much work, but maybe some texture or filter could help.
The labeling is still temporary but behind the scenes I made up a system that will work nicely for that many places to be named.
Serain 3167 WIP9.jpg
One week of hard work later here's the next update.
I worked some more on the surroundings, the fields, roads and stuff. I also redid the labeling bubbles. In the moment I try to come up with a city coat of arms but it takes some time. The next step will be to label things.
Serain 3167 WIP10.jpg
As always I'm open for suggestions and constructive criticism.
This is a very striking style, Eld, and strangely attractive with the beautiful golds and greens of the surrounding countryside.
There are so many ways to map a city, so criticism is difficult (for me), but you ask for suggestions?
I only really have one:
If working on the individual blocks of houses to make them more irregular is just too much to contemplate, how about adding just one more layer and going over the existing roads with short lengths of slightly different widths.
It took me just 2 minutes to get from this:
ROADS01.JPG To this: ROADS02.JPG
Using a very old and rather broken version of Corel Photopaint, so I expect GIMP would provide the facilities to do much better than my hurried lines - and to me they add so much more detail.
Last edited by Mouse; 10-25-2016 at 08:23 AM.
Hey Mouse, thanks very much!
Your suggestion is a really good one, it adds much to the chaotic feeling of a freely growing city.
However, I don't know yet how to achieve this effect. As I understood you worked with a buildings layer and a roads layer?
The problem is that I have only one layer for the buildings were I erased the streets by stroking the paths with the eraser tool. Maybe my method isn't the best way to do so, yet it was only composed to be the easiest and fastest to achieve the look I wanted.
First thought how I could achieve your suggestion: I could duplicate the layer, fill the streets with black again and add a layer mask, whereupon I stroke the street-paths with the transparency-colour. Doing so, I have the layer with the buildings and the layer mask with the roads so I can change them easily without reworking all the streets. Don't know how to work with the two colours though and the fact that most streets are depicted by very few paths.
Totally different approach would be to distinguish between three things: Buildings, plots of land (estates? areas deviced as land to be build on?) and official streets. At the moment I only distinguish streets and plots of land so that free space on them isn't depicted. I will think about it and maybe run a little test map to see if the results are pleasing.
In truth I only had one layer. I just kept drawing white lines on a blank brown background.
Is it difficult to just use a slightly fatter eraser tool to dab along bits of the existing roads, and then a slightly thinner eraser tool to add a few minor paths?
If not, then that's where my understanding of your software fails, I'm sorry to say. I don't use PS, you see :shrug:
Finally I decided against the street design that Mouse proposed for two reasons. Firstly I can't afford the time to do it within this kind of maps as it is somewhat difficult with all those layers and paths to achieve the effect. Secondly I found that many maps don't do it that way and I like it as it is.
Now here's an update of the map. I changed the black of the buildings for some color and texture. I hope this makes more clear that it's not single buildings but built-up-areas which are depicted. However, I'm not sure about the color itself and the brightness and opacity of it.
I also added the labels and a grid. Now I'm wondering what to fill in the blank space at the bottom of the legend.
Serain 3167 WIP12small.jpg
Always hungry for comments, tips, criticism and other thoughts.
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