The Lands of Indra

[CharlesRobinson]

This was a end of semester school project for my Foundations A course last semester. This is for my degree in Communication Design.

The symbols were first sketched and then hand painted. The bitmaps were hand painted. I then photographed everything and then touched them up. I then uploaded them to Photoshop for processing (such as creating transparent backgrounds). I then loaded them up into Campaign Cartographer 3+ to create the map. I used the border and text from that program.

You can see the sketches and initial painting as well at https://www.cartographersguild.com/s...=31791&page=20

Thanks!

[arsheesh]

Nice work on this. The hand-drawn illustrations are charming.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

[CharlesRobinson]

Thanks arsheesh! :-)

[rdanhenry]

That poor elephant!

The hand-drawing really paid off. CC maps are often immediately obvious, but this produced something unique enough I'd have never known you were using CC if you hadn't mentioned it.

My only criticism is that the cities/towns are placed too regularly. The spacing between them is almost constant and most are along the coast and those that are not form chains like volcanic islands. Why no settlement on the river where it flows out of the forest in the north? Water, wood, and apparently a fertile area, so it is a logical place to settle. There's also no town at that river's mouth, though. Is it cursed? What one would normally see are some coastal port cities, but most of the settlements would be smaller fishing villages. Trade that brings growth up to town or city size would general concentrate on a few best ports. Also, without much settlement inland, there's little incentive to bring in the kind of abundant traffic that grows the port. Likewise, larger port settlements should be thicker on the side with more rivers; rivers are the most convenient highways to move goods inland, and they provide the water for inland inhabitants to receive those goods. Of course, all this assumes that you are mapping the larger settlements; the peculiar distribution of settlements could make sense if another criterion for inclusion was used. This is all very rule of thumb, of course, as many other factors than those I mentioned determine where initial settlements occur and which settlements grow and to what extent.

[CharlesRobinson]

Thanks rdanhenry!

Yes you are absolutely correct. But this was made real quick for a school project to demonstrate the various art aspects that we covered over the semester. I covered sketching, painting, photography, photo-manipulation, and photoshop. I also had a lot of cultural research that I had to do for the project (I had to write a paper). I also had projects for other classes. As such, I was on a strict time schedule and just wanted to put together an interesting image for the instructor and the in class critique. It worked, I got a perfect score for my final project for the class. Lol! :-)

Thanks again!