Reply With QuoteIt's beautiful already!!! Are the horizontal lines areas where there are cliffs?
Time for an update again.
After a christmas break I have continued with my project. Quite many things have happened since. Firstly, I tested styles for the city symbols and tried to find objects which would have a hole of the right size, so I could draw many small symbols of same size. I found three good different-sized round holes, but not a square one. So, the square cities are drawn with just a ruler, and some of them, to my annoyance, are not exact squares. With the big cities I decided to go with a hachured area. Locations for the hachured cities, square cities and biggest circle towns were copied from my old maps. After that, I started to fill the map with small towns and villages. I did quite many of them, I hope I won't regret it later.
Before christmas I also purchased a sepia-coloured Copic multiliner for the contours. It seemed to work well, so I redraw all the contours with it and erased the pencil lines. It looks so much better without the pencil lines, which were already fading away in some parts. The map looks quite nice as a black-brown-white map, but the contours will be less visible in the end when it's coloured. However,some of the pencil lines are quite impossible to erase after so much erasing and redrawing earlier. If I had known in the first place that I’m going to erase all the lines, I would have used a softer pencil.
Another thing, I draw the borders between the countries. That came up quite nicely. The borders are not very striking now but they will have a red buffer in the end. I also tested my new Koi watercolor pens more for the elevation and I think I know what colours I will use.
The next step is adding the roads and railroads, can’t wait to draw them! After that comes probably the most time-consuming part: the naming and lettering. Coining all the names is not a problem, but writing them all somehow to the map with a satisfying result will be slow. I haven’t counted, but I think I have about 400 - 500 features to name.
Below as attachment are a scan and a photograph.
As earlier, all comments and criticism are welcome!
scan2.jpg
pic3.jpg
It's beautiful already!!! Are the horizontal lines areas where there are cliffs?
Thank you!Originally Posted by whisper_my_name
Hmm, I don't quite understand your question. There are no horizontal lines in the map... what lines do you mean? The brown lines show places of equal altitude. In a 3-dimensional world they are, of course, horizontal by definition. The closer they are to each other, the steeper the slope. However, the scale of the map is so zoomed-out, that no actual cliffs could be shown.
Oops.....you are quite correct, the lines I'm referring to are not horizontal. I had not been awake very long when I posted this.
I'm going to attempt to attach a close up of what I'm referring to, as I really want to understand what the area represents. There are several on your map, all in black, tightly spaced parallel lines.Untitled.png
~ whisper
Now I understand! Oh yes, it's not so obvious now. These areas are the biggest cities, which are so large, that there's no point marking them with one symbol. The area represents the built-up area of the city. The style is copied from a 1950's atlas, which has been an inspiration for many things in this map.
Those areas will hopefully look more like cities when they are connected with roads and labeled suitably. Also I'm considering to colour the spaces between the black lines with red, which would make them very prominent.
Last edited by Meton; 01-24-2018 at 05:33 PM.
@Meton - thanks for clarifying. I'm quite new to map making, and as I browse other people's works, I see so many symbols and designs that I don't understand. I have much to learn.
~ whisper
A small update. I have been drawing the roads and railroads for some time now. It’s slower and more difficult than I had realised, and also it’s really fun. But there’s still quite many roads to add, and I will wait until I have them finished before the next scan. There’s a small detail picture from the southern part to show how the map is looking like now.
In the meantime, I have tested the lettering and and the colouring. I realised, that alcohol-based markers were not at all as bad as I had somehow thought, and purchased some Promarkers with quite perfect colours to colour the sea. I wanted to see the colours together to be certain about them, so I decided to draw a small test map. It was also a perfect place to test the lettering. The test map became quite nice and I posted it in the Finished maps forum for comments.
Making a small finished map was a good idea also because I found out that the pens I had already used to draw major roads and railroads were not water-resistant and they got smudged and messed with the colouring pens. I’m so frustrated that I didn’t realise this earlier, because I have used a lot of those pens already in the wip map. I purchased immediately Pigma Microns with similar mark and continued drawing the roads and railroads with them. I just have to very careful when colouring near the ”bad” roads and railroads, and hope I will manage this setback.
pic4.jpg
Last edited by Meton; 02-15-2018 at 07:10 AM.
I recently had the same problem. I had used a blue (non micron pen) to draw in my rivers. When I applied the watercolor, the first river started to bleed like crazy. I ended up going over my rivers with a black micron. I used a heavy hand and they ended up being a little bit darker than I would have preferred, but it "locked in" that blue underneath that caused the bleeding. Maybe you could try a similar fix for your railroads and roads.....good luck!
~ whisper
Holy crap, now this is what I call effort! I'm fairly certain I could never pull this kind of thing off if I tried to do it by hand. Respect, sir, and loads of it.
I'm looking forward to seeing where this goes!
Good to know that I'm not only one who made a mistake in this water-resistance issue... That sounds like a good solution, but I think I don't want to make the lines wider. I made a test where I just drew the bad line over with the micron of the same width, and it didn't help, as you could expect. I guess I don't have other options than suffer the consequences and colour carefully.
Thank you a lot!I respect you for saying this. I know, I must be a little crazy doing this. It has alredy taken over three months in the making and it's not near to be finished.
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Time for an update again! The project is beginning to look more and more like a real map. I finally got the roads and railroads finished. This part of the project was more like transport planning than just drawing, so it took time to think where would the roads be located in a plausible world. I'm quite happy with the results. However, my map is a bit implausible in the sense that there is a road drawn to reach every single town and village, but no other roads. Usually, in this scale maps, there are less roads drawn and many of the smaller places seem not to be reached by the road network.
In addition, I drew the grid of latititudes and longitudes. I copied the projection and the locations of parallels and meridians from a page of the same scale in a real-world atlas. I marked the ends of the lines on the edges of the paper and connected the meridians with a ruler and parallels with a handy flexible curve that I found from a local art supply shop. As you can see, the place is on the southern hemisphere. It's not essential for the place to be in an earth-sized planet with the same coordinate system used in our planet, but using a real-world atlas as help was the easiest way for giving the map the same look as in real maps.
In the meantime I have also continued to test the lettering for the labels. I't really helped to make that test map I told earlier, I know now better what looks good and what doesn't. I'm really looking forward to start writing on the map, which I can do now at any time. This is the moment that I thought earlier, that I have to choose whether I'll continue by hand or start doing the labeling and colouring digitally. I'm certainly going to continue by hand, but if I want later test using the computer, the scan below is also the baseline for that.
As usual, feel free to speak your mind and give comments or criticism!
scan3.jpg
www.orbigraphia.com - More maps also in instagram @orbigraphia
