March/April 2015 Lite Challenge Entry: Darrowholm

[ChickPea]

Jaxilon, thanks for your comment, I really appreciate your thoughts.

I want to redo the rivers slightly. I'm not keen on the smooth edges and would like to roughen them up a little and add some texture to the water. I'll look at the 'Y' intersection again too, as I hadn't thought about the effect of erosion. I see what you're saying about the tree perspective vs the houses. Hmm. Hadn't considered that. Not sure if I can fix it though, so it might have to stay. I'm amused you're thinking of peas. I kept thinking of apples when I was doing them LOL!

Finally, thanks for the encouragement. I know I'll never be a great artist, but I sorta feel that so long as I'm improving by my (lowly) standards, that's all that counts. This is only the second challenge I've taken part in, but I'm really enjoying it and I like feeling part of the community. People are welcoming and encouraging, and often very willing to share their greater knowledge and experience, which means a lot to me. I'd highly encourage other newbies or those with less skills to dive in and take part too. Every project teaches you something.

[ChickPea]

Another update.

I've tweaked a lot of things since my last post. I've tried to improve the river by roughening it and adding some water texture. I've also messed about the with shading on the grass to make it less flat. I've changed my roads from grey to a much lighter shade, as I think they stand out better that way, and I changed the colour of the sidebar area (the original was only a placeholder anyway.) I've also got my text just about written, though I want to leave it for a day or two to see if I want to tweak it. I may have gone a little overboard with the text. I ended up writing about ~700 words in a sorta mini story format. Not sure if it works or not LOL!

### LATEST WIP ###
village-1.jpg

Still to do:

More buildings: Castle / Inn / Church & graveyard / Blacksmith
Some crops and a quarry
Bridges and a ferry
Maybe a market stall in the village square (this ties in with my text)
A legend in the top right

I feel this version is an improvement on the last, though there's a few things I'm not completely happy with. I'm starting to feel my little pea trees (thanks Jax!) aren't quite working. I'm going to be covering up a lot of them at the top right with a legend, so it may not look too bad when there's just a few dotted here and there, but I'm thinking they don't quite match the feel of the rest of the map? I'm hoping to get a fair bit done over the long weekend so I'll see how I feel once things are a little further along.

[J.Edward]

It's looking very good ChickPea.
I think the tree problem is the mixing of 2 perspectives.
I still like them but that seems like the issue to me.

Meant to add... the changes look good.

[Jaxilon]

Nice improvements, the river is much better. I like the colors you have used and I think your map is getting the point across nicely.

I haven't looked back to see if anyone has mentioned it already but the shadows on the buildings are a little wonky. It looks like they are not all the same direction. Mostly though they are just so rounded when they would actually match the shape of the roof lines. I'm guessing you hand painted them with a round brush but I think you could save time and look more natural if you took the houses layer and put a drop shadow on all of them at the same time pointed in the direction opposite of where the sun is. Be mindful that the direction of your house shadows will need to match the trees (by that I mean your tree shadows look like the sun is rather high overhead and slightly to the right but not much because your shadow is still directly beneath the foliage. This means you wont' have a lot of shadow on the houses).

I'm not trying to bust your chops with all my comments but I think if you keep at it you will find you are capable of making very nice maps. If you are anything like me you will find yourself walking around in life looking more closely at how shadows move across the landscape, and how textured the walls are and every feature of the landscape will capture your imagination as to how you can put it into a map.

LOL, when I joined here I really started looking at the world around me more than I ever did before. I wanted to capture the texture of everything for use in my maps.

Anyway, keep up the good work.

[Larb]

I think the perspective clash of the trees vs buildings could be solved by just cutting off/deleting the trunks and shifting the tree shadow nearer the rounded leafy bit.

[ChickPea]

Jax, thanks for your comment. Don't feel like you're 'busting my chops' in the slightest. I'm happy to get advice from those with way more skill and experience than me. I appreciate your time.

Larb, yeah, I don't think the forests were working as they were.

So, the trees ...

I've managed to get rid of the trunks, so they're, uh, pea-like blobs now. I deleted all the shadows and recreated them using GIMP's bog standard shadow filter, so they're a lot more subtle now and hopefully look better. I also added a couple of bridges, and some crops. I dunno about the crops, though I ended up spending more time than I'd have liked on them. Do they look ridiculous? I tried to break them up and colour them a little so they don't look so uniform, but I'm not sure if I've pulled it off. I'm not quite sure of the best way to illustrate fields of crops.

I also added my mini-novella in the sidebar, which I hope is spelling error free. I got a little carried away with the story, but at least it satisfies the requirements of the challenge (cos I'm not sure if my writing skills are any better than my mapping skills LOL!)

Anyway, here's the latest:
### LATEST WIP ###
village.jpg

[Belgath]

Looks vary good. How long is a learning curve on using a photo editor.

[Bogie]

Great work, I did not see any spelling errors, so I think you are good to go.

[Jaxilon]

I think this is a very cute map and it just makes me smile for some reason so that's a good thing.

[ChickPea]

Looks vary good. How long is a learning curve on using a photo editor.

That's not an easy question. It's up there with 'how long is a piece of string'. You can probably get a handle on the basics in a few weeks and, if you have instructions, the more complicated techniques probably aren't that hard. But learning the full power of all the different tools isn't something you're going to grasp quickly. I suspect even pros learn a new trick every now and then. Do you have much experience with image editors? What software are you using? My best tip is try out some tutorials, not just here, but all over the web, and watch tutorial videos on Youtube. Even if you have no interest in whatever they're creating, you'll probably learn something from watching the steps they take to get there. I think video tutorials are awesome, because you can use a spare ten minutes here and there to try to improve your knowledge without a huge headache.

Bogie, thanks for reading!

Jax, haha, thank you.

So, another update. I probably won't have much time before next weekend now, so I'm trying to cram in as much as possible!

I've created a church and mausoleum which probably look completely out of place for a hick village but oh well. There's a few other new buildings too, and I had to rejig the roads slightly to make everything fit. I've also done the legend. I still have to create a castle and a ferry, then only some minor tweaks hopefully.

I couldn't resist the pea tree theme in the legend. OK, I think those may actually be upside down grapes, but don't stare too hard and it all works!

### LATEST WIP ###
village.jpg