Motley Mapping Fragments by Abu Lafia

[ChickPea]

I like the mountain styles on both your pics. The first kind may be 'simple' but they look very attractive and would work well with a certain style of map. I also love the contrast with the dark, dark water. I'd love to see the full map and hope you post it one of these days! The line art on the second style is very good, but maybe they could benefit from a little more shading to highlight the dark and light areas? Just a thought.

[AzurePlanet]

Hi Abu, your excellent result on "The Fishbone Wharf" makes me want to re-born my old sketches too!
And yes, as Chick kindly suggested, a tutorial on that would be highly appreciated.

[Abu Lafia]

Thanks you guys for the feedback!

@Azelor: The font is Fraenkisch by Dieter Steffmann, who made a s***-load of amazing fonts which are all free for personal use (and many of them are well known and used by the people around here i guess), as he is against the commercialization of fonts (Link to his personal Website in german, where he writes about his first steps in digital font creation).
When i first saw this font, i knew i HAVE to use it on a map one day.

@ ChickPea: Glad you like the colour choice! I wasn't quite sure about it, cause i'm using my old monitor atm, having a bit of a different colour representation. With the first mountains. i was just thinking about making the whole working step of "doing mountains" a lot quicker, as this usually takes sooo much time. For the second ones i only put in some rough lights and no shadows so far (good catch! ). I guess they'll get a lot more depth with some shades and more refined highlights.
The first pic is indeed just a snapshot of a far bigger map (that's why the file is named TNBM ), which looks quite empty so far. That's also the reason, why i started with the smaller Grant & Karst map to apply the techniques i used for the first one.

Here is another update of the Grant & Karst map (i really should start a wip thread soon...):
Grant_Karst_WIP_II.jpg
I layed in some rivers in the southern area (where the Kingdom of Karst is) and added some more mountain ranges in the north (Grantian Kingdom). I also tweaked the colour of the title more red, as it was originally intended.

... Oh, Azure Planet, you nearly "ninja'ed" me with your post ... Glad you like the sketch! It was indeed intended to just show how easy it was to make a quick sketch look somewhat fancy . I'd love to see some of your old stuff revamped. Btw. the kind suggestion from chick was regarding the "Customizable Banner" Tutorial i posted here originally and moved now here. But i might make a small tutorial for this parchment style sketches too.

Cheers,
AL

[J.Edward]

That's quite nice Abu.
That color scheme looks very pleasing, especially with the red lettering.

[Ilanthar]

It's looking great Abu! The only thing I'm not fond of is the bright line you have along the coast (on the land). A bit too bright to my taste. Oh, and thank you for this link, there are indeed some very interesting fonts there .

[Abu Lafia]

Thank you guys for the feedback! I'm notoriously starting new maps, leaving older projects unfinished. While i am somewhat happy with my mountains, i usually stuck doing the forests and then losing interest :/ So instead of opening a wip-thread for every single one of them, here are some unfinished maps i started the last months:
The "Grant&Karst" map i posted above is a typical case, i finished the mountain linework and some blobs where the forest should be, then started trying some things with the forests and skipped them in favour of labels and stuff...
Grant_Karst_WIP_III.jpg

On this map, something similar happend. With the forests ahead, i switched to making the border and some nice ornaments and never came back...
TheDawningJarldoms.jpg

Here i planned doing a more "plain" map (with political borders), but it looked a bit too empty in the end. After some attempts of doing mountains and forests, i decided it isn't looking that bad without this stuff...
FernhagPlain.jpgFernhagPolitical.jpg

Finally a piece, where i tried to make a "proper" isometric coastline (in fact i just compressed it vertically to 57,7% as suggested by torstan and xpian) as the mountains i go with at the moment look somewhat off on the above maps. Haven't finished the mountains yet, but i somehow fear the forests ... maybe it'll be an arid, rocky island
UnnamedYet.jpg

Maybe it's because i somewhat tunneled on iso maps since i like the mountains i developed in my Tarkir map (also unfinished btw.). I just haven't found a way to draw forests that fit the style of the mountains somewhat and are not to detail-heavy. The forests i started on the "Grant&Karst" map are not too bad, but they took way too long to do.
While these maps are rotting on my hard drive, i'm working on two encounter maps for an rpg session, and the best thing is: there are no forests on it!

Cheers,
AL

[ChickPea]

This probably isn't an entirely helpful comment, but it makes me strangely happy to know that I'm not the only one with a hard drive full of unfinished maps. I have eleven half-finished maps (I number them!) I definitely want to finish up at least eight or nine of those but there's always some new idea that I just need to try....

Your pics look great, even in their unfinished state. Hope you find the impetus to tackle the forests.

[Meshon]

Great! Thanks for sharing these. I have a specific question about the Dawning Jarldoms map. It looks like you've got an inland glow going on, where the land at the edges of the water is lighter and a different colour. Now, what's driving me crazy is trying to figure out how you made the lighter area on the seacoasts larger than the very controlled areas along the edges of rivers. Is it hand done? Different layers for rivers and coasts? Tell me all your secrets!

Nice to see your work and I'll add myself to the list of collectors of unfinished maps…

cheers,
Meshon

[Abu Lafia]

Hi Chickpea, yeah i was hoping there are other people having the same problem too... not sure if " a shared problem is a halved problem", but i still have hope not to abandon those pieces

Hey Meshon, before i can tell you my secrets, you need to be initiated into the inner circles of ... well, i have to admit it's rather "Pfusch" (no idea how to translate... flub? blotch? bungling? ... funny words actually) so no really "clean" way to do this. I guess, this won't scare you off, so i'll give it a try to explain:
Yes, it's two (or better four) separate layers, the first with the wider "inner glow" (i usually make it by selection -> path, stroke path (keep the selection or maybe invert it) ) from the landmass layer without rivers, the other layer with a narrower "inner glow" from the landmass layer with rivers. Than i went "alpha to selection" on the first "glow-layer" and cleared the selected area on the second "glow-layer". Maybe some erasing by hand on the "junctions" is necessary afterwards. The same i did on the "Grant& Karst" map and the "TNBM" map. Hope it makes some sense, as i worked with gimp.

[Meshon]

Hey Meshon, before i can tell you my secrets, you need to be initiated into the inner circles of ... well, i have to admit it's rather "Pfusch"

Oh wow I've been initiated into the inner circles of Pfusch! So exciting!

And thanks for the explanation. It looks really smooth and I like the effect a lot.