Map Of Ceres, 16th Millennium

**töff** · 06-26-2009, 01:26 AM

This is part of a scifi serial I'm doing called "Dark Vision" about an ex-terrorist soldier confronting her past, present, and future. Currently the serial is visiting 5 locations chosen by Cartographers Guild members, which I call the "Tour Of The Solar System." The thread started here. Ceres is the fourth of five stops. (A previous map from the serial, "Venus Public Transport," actually got chosen as a featured map here, yay me!

) I've begun a map of the solar system that I hope to finish in time for the wrap of the fifth location, which is Mars.

This map was inspired by the weird winged planet that I envisioned Ceres as having become in the CLVIIth century. I did a cover picture for chapter 31, and somehow or another for chatper 32 I could not resist mapping the whole planet, which is mostly agricultural land on the day side and a "hive of scum and villainy" on the night side.

I took a two components from Photoshop: the ag texture, stitched & tweaked from some satellite pix from Google; and the Midnight City lights, which are much more visible on the cover pic, glowing green in the night, than they are on the final map because so many city locations & roads etc. had to be layered over them. Oh, and the stars background is swiped (I think) from a Hubble shot. Oh, and the oblique nano colors, I actually rendered 3D from a grid instead of building it in vector form. Cheating, I know. But when it all looks the same after you print, who cares how you got there? Oh, the Cereal Reverence logo was done in Photoshop, with the wheat shapes brought in from Illustrator.

Otherwise, everything was done in Illustrator, with mutiple layers and quite a few applications of alpha masks and other fx. At one point, my filesize was over 1gig, but I cleaned out a few things and saved to .AI instead of .EPS and skipped previews & bitmaps etc., didn't embed placed files ... that helped, and the final filesize dropped to 250meg.

I did the work all "straight" with an angled frame; then I angled the whole graphic so the frame was straight to the paper. The final printed piece is 16.5x10.5".

There's so much going on on this planet, in my head, that I think I could spend the rest of my life telling stories on it! But I will have to be content with the 2 "Dark Vision" chapters I've done here ... at least for now ... because I must needs get myself to Mars next!