Kenby - by Heruca

[Robbie]

Map (Click to enlarge)




Created in: Dunjinni / Photoshop

Review
This map is brought to us by one of our long time members Heruca. It demonstrates a great combination of community mapping resources and compositing skill. The map itself has a very warm hand painted feel to it even though it of course was done digitally. The variety in buildings and organic placement of everything really brings this map home as a very useful piece of cartography.

Artists Notes
This map depicts the small farming community of Kenby, in the region of Kelerak, which is part of the world of Farland (www.farlandworld.com). As mentioned in the original thread, it's a re-envisioning of the adventure author's map.

In creating this area map, I was also attempting to establish a mapping style that I can use in the future for other area maps that I might create. I went with as close to a "realistic" look as I could manage. I wanted each house to look distinct and original, rather than just showing a bunch of rectangle-shaped iconic structures. The low-resolution sample posted here doesn't really do the map justice, but there's a close-up posted in the original thread that lets you see the details better.

The Dundjinni forums proved to be an invaluable resource for source images, not just for the houses, but also for the bridges and general source textures.

The crop fields I had to make myself, using a technique AidyBaby taught me on another forum. It was very tedious work; all the wavy crop lines were hand-drawn to fit each field's shape and orientation. It nearly drove me batty doing that with a mouse. I suspect it probably could have been done in a much simpler fashion by someone who really knows Photoshop well, or someone with a drawing tablet.

The map was created in Photoshop CS2, using dozens upon dozens of layers, layer effects, adjustment layers, masks, etc. I originally thought I would spend just a couple of days on the map, but I think it took me around a week or more to complete it. But I'm happy with the results.

I hope it makes playing through the adventure module more fun and entertaining. Maybe someday I'll map out some of the important building interiors that are highlighted in the module.

Original Thread
Click here to view the original thread by the author.