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I have certainly been thinking of that. It would help in moving cargo and building materials to and from the city, but it would also vastly lower the defensive capabilities of the city. As it is now, the city can only be reached by boat -- people from the mainland can use one of the ferry harbours on either side of the river mouth, and these can easily be pulled out or sunk if word reaches the city of an imminent attack. Defending or destroying a stone bridge is a lot harder, and while destroyin a wooden bridge is definitely a lot easier, I'm not sure a wooden bridge can span such long distances over salty, turbulent waters using medieval technology: the closest distance to the mainland is about 0.6 miles, or just about 1 km, which is only just below the current world record of 1.2 km for wooden bridges (and that one was built only in 1860, spanning a calm, freshwater lake).Originally Posted by Ilanthar
Still looking good. Do you plan to connect the city to the land with some big bridge? I'm just curious.
So yeah, considering that I don't think I'm gonna go for bridges connecting the city with the mainland, but I will certainly span some of larger distances with regular ferry lines.
Haha, I guess that's the idea right?
A good point, and well noted! I have been thinking the same thing actually. One thing I can do is thin out the linework a little bit (I've done this in the past with a simple mask), but the past few days I started dreaming of redoing the map entirely, but this time at least twice as large...
This may sound like a ridiculous amount of extra work, but I've begun to notice the hardest work is getting things in the right place. The actual drawing is in fact quite fast. So if I decide to go and size it up, it'll be after I finished all the linework.
On the other hand, the original idea was for this map to appear in my novel, which rules out anything larger than A4 (the current size of the image), so if I go for that, I suppose thinning out the linework is the best course of action here.
To give you a quick idea of the effect, this is a section of the unaltered image:
crop_unaltered.jpg
and this is a quick-n-dirty masked version of the same area:
crop_masked.jpg
You'll notice there's a few spots where the masking could have been a little better, but that can always be tweaked manually. But all in all it's quite acceptable, especially if I'm gonna overlay it with colour layers anyway (these will make the distinction between different surfaces even more pronounced). So once this exercise of inking everything is done, I'm probably gonna throw a mask against it and be done with it.
Oh yes, Venice was a big inspiration here. The place has a ton of history, but unfortunately not much of it is taught in schools (or at least not when I was in school). The city itself is super crowded with tourists nowadays, so a visit generally ends up being a disappointment... but reading about the city and its history opened a world of imagination for me. Ganador has always been imagined as a city on a bunch of islands, all the way back to 2006 when I started writing, but it's only fairly recently that all this Venetian influence started creeping in.
Alright, a smallish update for you guys!
Like I wrote earlier, getting things in the right place takes much more time than the actual drawing, and especially so for small, irregular regions (such as all these itty bitty islands). The big challenge is to cram each of the islands chock full of houses and still keep the contours reasonably intact. I allow for somewhat larger infractions where there's docks -- there's no point in having my wharfs all wiggly and loopy, so straight-ish lines are the way to go in these places -- but where the houses go all the way to the water, I want the coastline to retain as much of its original squigliness as possible. Which isn't always easy with long, narrow buildings. But I think I managed to make that work.
Ganador_09.jpg
So, what do you think?
