January 2011 Challenge: The Coreroads of the Bergan Dwarves

[JackOfHearts]

I love it so far! Can you talk about your process a little bit??

[moutarde]

Well, there's certainly a lack of planning. I kind of missed the journey between two points part of the challenge requirements, and started this with the concept that there's a few safe cities, and everywhere else is extremely dangerous - so I'm going to have to work the journey part in somehow.

I started on the regional inset with the mountains, and I wanted them to have that nice hand-drawn look, so I browsed through the tutorials section and found this. Which, it turns out, is a ridiculously easy way of hand-drawing your mountains. If you look closely at my map, you can probably tell that I started at the bottom and worked my way to the top, from the quality of the mountains The coastlines are a modification of Oldguy's Tutorial. I added some extra steps on to it, and then traced over the coastline with a tablet, so that the line strength wouldn't be even all the way along, and to keep the hand-drawn feel. And the woodcut along the coastlines is a whole lot of patience. Little squiggly lines all the way along. I made a nice woodcut texture for another map a while ago, but again, wanted to keep this hand-drawn. Rivers are also simple tablet lines, pressure-sensitive is a must for that of course. Finally, after all that, using a font to do the labels seemed just plain wrong. So I used the Algerian font as a guide, and drew the letters by hand. So they look nice, but they have that little margin of error in them to keep em honest.

Right now I'm working on the tunnels, for which, I think, I just need to start drawing all sorts of little off-shoots and caverns now. The journey is probably going to have to be represented by drawings and filler text - the section I put aside for the depth map may have to pre-empted for such things. Maybe a most-dangerous list of the Fungoids an unlucky dwarf might encounter

[moutarde]

Phew, I never would have thought that drawing out extensive cave and tunnel systems could be so mind-numbingly boring! Some of the squigglies are natural cavern and tunnels, while other are former veins of ore that have been mined out. The little x's are just to remind me which of the squigglies are caverns for later on. Never having drawn caves before, I'm hoping that these are falling somewhere in the middle between terrible and brilliant

[moutarde]

Just another update, I figure I'm about halfway done the minor tunnels and caverns. I think I'm going to have to come up with a way to indicate the depth of the various tunnels - it's starting to get a little confusing! Also sketched out the first Fungoid, the Voelhoorn! Basically just giant tentacles

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[JackOfHearts]

Well, there's certainly a lack of planning. I kind of missed the journey between two points part of the challenge requirements, and started this with the concept that there's a few safe cities, and everywhere else is extremely dangerous - so I'm going to have to work the journey part in somehow.

I started on the regional inset with the mountains, and I wanted them to have that nice hand-drawn look, so I browsed through the tutorials section and found this. Which, it turns out, is a ridiculously easy way of hand-drawing your mountains. If you look closely at my map, you can probably tell that I started at the bottom and worked my way to the top, from the quality of the mountains The coastlines are a modification of Oldguy's Tutorial. I added some extra steps on to it, and then traced over the coastline with a tablet, so that the line strength wouldn't be even all the way along, and to keep the hand-drawn feel. And the woodcut along the coastlines is a whole lot of patience. Little squiggly lines all the way along. I made a nice woodcut texture for another map a while ago, but again, wanted to keep this hand-drawn. Rivers are also simple tablet lines, pressure-sensitive is a must for that of course. Finally, after all that, using a font to do the labels seemed just plain wrong. So I used the Algerian font as a guide, and drew the letters by hand. So they look nice, but they have that little margin of error in them to keep em honest.

Right now I'm working on the tunnels, for which, I think, I just need to start drawing all sorts of little off-shoots and caverns now. The journey is probably going to have to be represented by drawings and filler text - the section I put aside for the depth map may have to pre-empted for such things. Maybe a most-dangerous list of the Fungoids an unlucky dwarf might encounter

Thanks for the discussion. I'm loving it so far.

[tilt]

looking really good - lot of patience gone into this..

[moutarde]

I think I'm finally done drawing little random squiggly lines. Maybe still a few touchups left to be done on them, but basically finished. Thank god!! Time to start making stuff pretty, should be much more fun

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[Immolate]

One thing you might do is try to impart some heft on all those delicate lines on the right, perhaps by giving a solid background to them. They just don't look very Dwarvish at the moment.

[moutarde]

My original thought with those was to add some colour to them, kind of like a traffic map, but with the colour indicating the relative danger instead. But that could very well end up looking stupid, in which case I'll try giving some black fill, with a coloured outline. Maybe the colour just won't work at all, in which case I might be hooped, because I havn't come up with any other really good ideas to help convey the points of light thing yet.

[moutarde]

Added in the danger colours for the main roads. I think they might work. Though I'm worried that I'll get them all coloured in, and then decide that it looks like crap.... I also that if I'm using colour there, I should use colour everywhere, so I coloured a little bit of the regional inset to see how it would. I kinda like it Any comments on colour are very much appreciated.

Edit: Not sure where that big stripe of weirdness across the middle came from. Jpg must have saved funny I guess.

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