Palestine 'at the time of christ'

[V1G1LANC3]

Hi, This is my first take on a real world location. The maps style is a mix of Classic and biblical reference maps. The map of Palestine at Christ time is one of the most printed historical maps in history (most bibles will have a similar map), thus I thought I would do my own Take this famous Map. The Map depicts the Roman province of Judea and its surrounding regions In the first century AD. The map is hand drawn with text, vectors and colours rendered in Digitally. The Text in the top right corner is Koine Greek the lingua Franca of the ancient Levant along with Aramaic. Would love to hear comments and feedback!

~Vigilance

[LordCartoart]

Very good map! I never knew that the Dead Sea was also called the Salt Sea.

[V1G1LANC3]

Thanks!

Yeah not sure on the exact history of the Dead Sea's etymology but I think you will find that 'The Salt Sea' is the term more commonly used in ancient times. I believe ancient Jewish literature also reffers to it as the salt sea.

[Mouse]

I like the rough scratchy ink look of this one, V

One thing that would improve the readability of all your maps is if you separated the letters from the background by either erasing a halo of the line work around each letter, or making it 'glow' over the top of the line work with a colour that is similar to the paper colour.

I'm probably not explaining what I mean very well, so I will go and see if I can find an example of what I mean for you and come back with it

EDIT: This is an extract from one of my own maps. Where the labels are readable without any extra work I've left well alone ('church'), but where I can't avoid having the name of the village right over all the business of the line work I've erased a halo of the line work around the letters to make the label readable. Some details are inevitably lost, but not enough that you can't tell what's there ('Gurgle Weir'). Its a relatively small price to pay to make sure the text is readable.

Text example.JPG

Its always far better to avoid placing labels directly over the top of a busy part of the map, but sometimes you just can't help it.

[V1G1LANC3]

Thanks,
I see what you mean, you see the trouble with real life maps is you don't have the creative license you do with fantasy maps, and if key locations are close to each other you get that messy look. I really like what you did with the Halo effect there, you don't notice any of the lost space and you don't even notice the glow but its just a lot smoother on the eyes. As you can see in mine where cities overlap mountains and such it looks very abrupt and certainly effects the overall visual flow of the map, it's definitely something I will look into for my next map project.

May I ask what software you are using?

[Mouse]

The line work for this map was done in Campaign Cartographer 3 and exported to GIMP, where the bit around the village name was erased using a feathered mask on the text. GIMP is free but not all that easy to learn. The effects are not 'live' as they are in PS, but fixed - you do a bevel, for instance, but if you change the layer that you have bevelled you need to do the bevel all over again to take account of the changes. In PS its live - the bevel adapts as you continue drawing (that's something I've deduced from lots of other comments made by other people because I've never used PS myself)

There are lots of other free apps you can try, like Krita (a bit crashy on smaller machines), Inkscape (a reasonably powerful vector app), but whatever apps you use you can always ask questions about how to do things here in the 'How do I' forum.

Hope that helps

[V1G1LANC3]

Yeah Thanks,
Paint.net (very different from Ms.Paint btw haha) works in a similar fashion to how gimp does. All the effects are fixed, and once you click of an image it morphs. So you have to do everything by layers to keep your images and text seperate. For example this map here is just under 100 layers(raw its like 50mb). I'll check out some of this software and some of these forums, thanks. I want to open the doors to more flexible software without paying a bucketload. (Prefferably without paying a dollar )

[Mouse]

Not so very long ago I trialled a piece of software called Affinity Photo It was hellishly more powerful and flexible than GIMP - light years ahead of it, and on a par with PS where the effects were concerned (they were live). But (and even though its something you can buy remarkably cheap for what it is), there seems to be a problem with lag on some machines and not others. Sadly on my machine I had nearly a whole second delay between starting a line and the software responding. This was happening with mouse and tablet equally, so I decided not to buy it in the end.

You might be one of the lucky ones though - one of the people who don't seem to have a lag at all. The 14 day trial is free, and if you don't have the lag problem £48 just once and once only is peanuts compared to nearly that much every month for something like PS.

[V1G1LANC3]

I'll look into it, 48 pounds which in AUS $ is probably like $70 is a little bit pricy right now. I would eventually like to get some more professional software latter on when I master my skills a bit more. I know my school has a lot of free software and I can actually get access to PS with my student card, which I will look into.