North Akinda (Partial Continent) And Ancillary Illustrations for The Scarred King 2

[Josh Foreman]

Here's a map I made for my latest book, The Scarred King 2: Journey. I hate it when fantasy novels that have a lot of traveling only have one giant map to refer to, so I made this one super huge and chopped it up so you can see where the characters are traveling at the start of every chapter. This map was done in Photoshop with hundreds of scratch made stamps. I spent a good year on it. But hopefully future maps won't take so long since I've got a good library of stamps and have a better idea what I'm doing. One thing I've learned from this community is that I really need to upgrade my boarder game to compete, haha!

AkindaNorthNames4SS.jpg

Some examples of the chapter maps:

MapAndQuoteCh03.jpg
MapAndQuoteCh05.jpg

Some chapters take place in one location so I did some modeling in Blender and Zbrush, then fancy filters to give it an inked look.

MapAndQuoteCh20.jpg

And other places without travel I put an establishing shot illustration of the area. This one done with mechanical pencil on paper, then colored in Photoshop.

MapAndQuoteCh04.jpg

One chapter our hero battles his way through an underground temple, so I did a sideview map. Really wanted to do a sexier cross-section, but I'd already spent a year longer than I hoped getting all the illustrations for the book done, so settled for this.

MapAndQuoteCh11.jpg

Speaking of illustrations, while not directly map related, here's a few. Some done in physical pencil, some modeled in Zbrush, all touched up/colored in Photoshop.

ChapterFrame02.jpg
ChapterFrame18.jpg
DractilAttack.jpg
LizardAttack.jpg

And finally, I needed to zoom in on a region more than the resolution of my master map allowed. I decided to give Krita a try for this as it allows you to make Image Hose style brushes that spray randomly from a pre-defined palette of full color stamps.
NorthAkindaSK5CanyonCloseup2S.jpg

[Greason Wolfe]

The borders on you chapter maps look just fine to me as do those that are present on the illustrations. Maybe, if it isn't too late to do so, you could tweak the border on the "world" map. Other than that, these all look really good to me.

[Adfor]

Regardless of your border game, the maps and illustrations are both remarkable. I love packing a lot of detail into a small area, but hot damn do you ever go nuts on the minutiae, to a point that I'm slightly dumbfounded.

A good dumbfounded, well done, rep incoming.

IR

[Arimel]

These are amazing! The master map is really detailed and I love the textures you used! The drawings are really interesting as well, although I am not sure I want to meet any of those characters.
The krita map is also good but I think the rivers could be improved slightly. They don't always seem to go behind things they are behind (not certain how to better say this) and there is one on the bottom left that is just hanging off a cliff face (I imagine it is an accidental click or something).
Still, really good all around!

[Caenwyr]

Yes, this is magnificent! I just can't stop roaming your master map - what a beauty! Repped!

[Josh Foreman]

These are amazing! The master map is really detailed and I love the textures you used! The drawings are really interesting as well, although I am not sure I want to meet any of those characters.
The krita map is also good but I think the rivers could be improved slightly. They don't always seem to go behind things they are behind (not certain how to better say this) and there is one on the bottom left that is just hanging off a cliff face (I imagine it is an accidental click or something).
Still, really good all around!

Huh... will you look at that... good catch, haha. I guess I need to hire QA to test my maps!

[Josh Foreman]

I got some good use out of these maps in the book trailer I just finished editing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_Fs23lQof8