Hello all!
I've got to say I've been blown away by the quality of work on this forum after browsing through. Very inspiring!
Anyway, I discovered how much fun and therapeutic drawing maps can be when I first drew one to visualise my D&D campaign world. Which also really helped with the world building I might add.
After practising illustration for a number of months, I went back to re-draw my campaign map and was very pleased with my style and the result. I'll share below.
Looking forward to continuing to learn from and be inspired by the members here.
Regards
Tim
Map link
https://www.mckinstryonline.com/imag...A4-vibrant.jpg
juramapA4-vibrant.jpg
Last edited by TimetoDraw; 02-24-2020 at 02:43 AM.
What great map to start things off! I like how clean and clear it looks, and the simple colour scheme works very well. I love those little scrolls on the location titles! What software are you working with?
Seems like you'll be a superb addition to the Guild's ranks, I look forwad to seeing what else you'll create. Welcome aboard!
Thank you very much!Originally Posted by Kellerica
I'm using Photoshop on a rather decrepit Mac laptop which, once I add high res textures, begins to creak and groan at me lol.
Always glad to meet a fellow PS mapper. Sorry to hear about your poor laptop, thoughBeen there...
Very nice map and a great start !
Hello, and thank you you very much.
I just noticed your Deviantart link, what gorgeous maps!Always glad to meet a fellow PS mapper. Sorry to hear about your poor laptop, though
If your texture is bigger than the canvas, after positioning it, give it a crop to remove the excess, and consider decreasing the amount of save steps it keeps, and occasionally hitting 'purge'. Consider merging layers relentlessly and even merging everything in a new file to draw over top of but keeping a previous version with layers. These little tricks might ekk a bit more performance out of your machine, but yeah, on my mac I maxed out at around 20 inches of raster work each way. I managed to do a 20x30 but it was so slow that it took forever to save, and at one point I crashed it while saving and lost around 4-6 hours of work, I figure. D: Map looks decent.
Click my banner, behold my art! Fantasy maps for Dungeons and Dragons, RPGS, novels. No obligation, free quotes. I also make custom PC / NPC / monster tokens.
Contact me: calthyechild@gmail.com or _ti_ (Discord) to discuss a map!
I would also add, and I say this quite frequently, when you save important files that your progressing like a WIP of a map, save the file as file_01.png then file_02.png and file_03.png etc. If you find that your system crashes whist your overwriting your one saved file then you can lose it and all of the work going in to it. Only when the map is finished should you delete all of the 01, 02,... up to the last one. If your short of hard drive space then keep at least 3 but ideally all of them. If you find a mistake that was made a while back then often you can go back to a previous version and pick up the bit where it went wrong and fix that for the latest version by stealing the correct bit five versions ago.
Also, when backing up, save a copy to an external USB hard drive. They are not all that expensive any more and then if you have your machine go down then you have a copy on disk. Once upon a time I used to have a second internal hard drive in my machine just for backing up the first one and lost all my files when my PC's PSU when bang and killed ALL of the internals to my machine including all of the hard drives at the same time. Never again !
In my view, its more important to get an external USB backup hard drive before you improve any PC or laptop, no matter how bad it is.
This is really practical advice, thank you both.
I do have a lot of excess texture outside of the visible window, I don't know why I haven't been removing the excess and merging. Very good point about over-writing the only save file. Photoshop is actually very, very good at recovering any work if the software crashes but you can't be too careful. Tricks of the trade I guess. I do thankfully have an external hard drive, as I fully expect my laptop to pack it in in the near future at 10+ years old and heavy use.
First of all, welcome to the Guild! Really nice map you shared as well, it looks like you're off to a good start.
If my computer is struggling to handle a map I'm working on I tend to save a master copy of my maps and work on certain elements with all the other layers flattened. Then I'm at most working on 3 layers as a time...which Photoshop is much happier about
I definitely understand though...save often!
- Josh
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