The World of Leth

[Wired]

What a breathtaking world! Rich colors, a large number of different terrains, a wonderfully styled compass.

[Voolf]

Excellent! I love it - and I loved watching you develop the separate parts of this map in the WIP. Every part of it is beautiful

Thank you Mouse. it was exciting to post those small updates and hear from you all.

This is an absolute beauty! I love how the various different terrains are depicted. The colouring and shading is very well done. Also, I'm getting a huge kick out of those long mountain chains for some reason! They're very well drawn, obviously, but I just adore how they shape the landscape. It's just fantastic work all round, and one to be very proud of. Hope I can rep you!

Well the world idea is not mine. Those mountains where already there, i just needed to redraw them. I was thinking at the beginning of making more spread mountains, but after i did one long range i realized that it does not look bad at all and did that for rest mountains too

Superbe work Voolf! I love the variety of vegetation and landscape you show us in this map. The little details like the Ullborg falls are wonderful to look at, and this compass is just brilliant! One can really see all the effort you put into this map and it came out fantastic.
I think i mentioned it already on your last Kaherm map wip and also somewhat echoing Max' comment above and your response to it, that i'm really looking forward to seeing a bit more of your own fingerprint on your future works like you showed for example in your awesome Kyushu map lately. Please don't get me wrong here, i just think that it's always wonderful to see the variety of map styles around growing and with your outstanding skills you have a lot to add to it!

Thanks Abu and yes i agree. It is hard though to come up with nice and original style. I still consider myself as a learner more then full-fledged creator. That beeing said, i don't understand completaly why some people keep placing me in torstan shadow. He must have made a great impact here on CG. True i learned from his tutorial a lot, but my mapmaking procces is different from his. I really love this style and probably intend to continue it.
There is a lot of people that draw in one particular style here, but noone put them into one bag and stick to only one person, so...

Great job Voolf.
The compass came out nicely too.

Thank you J.Edward

That is a wonderful map Voolf ! I followed your work on it with amazement and a little fan attitude (I pieced together the different parts you showed us like a Frankenstein map and made a GIF to follow your process). And I'm really glad to see you tagged it 2017, it'll be easier to find for next years Atlas awards

Haha, glad my wip gave you a little puzzle game to play with I haven't tagged this thread with 2017.... Must be set automatically, or maybe i have to thank ChickPea for silent ninja edit ?

A fantastic map, Voolf ! I love the diversity of the lands and, well, quite everything. The compass is indeed looking great, not that I had a doubt about it .

Thank you Ilanthar. I am also waiting to see your last wip project complete. I bet it will be awesome.

Thank you so much Voolf for your hard work and dedication. It was more than we both thought it would be and I really appreciate your commitment to this project. To say that I'm overjoyed is an understatement, the finished product is absolutely staggering for me to see. Its never easy to convey your imagination of an imaginary world to somebody else and have them translate it on to paper, but you were masterful at doing this. I hope that you have incredible success at cartography and have many more commissions in the future. Your a very good man and were an absolute pleasure to work with.
Cheers
David

Thank you Largus. It was a pleasure to work with you too and i am glad i could make a map that brings you so much joy

What a breathtaking world! Rich colors, a large number of different terrains, a wonderfully styled compass.

Thanks Wired.

[ThomasR]

My bad, it was tagged as jan 2017. I tagged it 2017 to be sure

[ChickPea]

Just a quick note about the tagging thing...

I had started to tag this year's Finished Maps with 'Jan 2017' instead of just '2017'. There were nearly 700 threads tagged with '2016' and that's a LOT of threads to browse through. My initial thought was to break them down into months this year. Each month would likely only have 2 or 3 pages of threads, and this feels like far more manageable chunks. At the end of the year, it would be simple to browse through a few months at a time, and easy to pick up where you left off if you don't want to tackle a year's threads at once. However... Robbie posted just yesterday, that he may be able to create a thumbnail gallery based on tags. If that's the case, threads would need to be '2017' rather than a monthly tag like 'Jan 2017', but we need to wait and see if the gallery is possible. I would say don't worry too much about the tagging thing right now. I imagine we'll know what's doable within the next week or two, and I might create a sticky thread asking people to tag their posts at that time. I don't want to post incorrect information though, so I'm not making any announcements for now. Whichever route we take, I'll make sure all threads already created this year are tagged correctly.

Sorry to interrupt your thread, Voolf!

[Voolf]

It is ok ChickPea, but i think it is better to write this in some general info section maybe, because not everyone will read it in this thread.

[ChickPea]

I will, once I know exactly what we're doing. Just wanted to respond to the comments made by yourself and Thomrey

[Abu Lafia]

Thanks Abu and yes i agree. It is hard though to come up with nice and original style. I still consider myself as a learner more then full-fledged creator. That beeing said, i don't understand completaly why some people keep placing me in torstan shadow. He must have made a great impact here on CG. True i learned from his tutorial a lot, but my mapmaking procces is different from his. I really love this style and probably intend to continue it.
There is a lot of people that draw in one particular style here, but noone put them into one bag and stick to only one person, so...

Hey Voolf, i thought some more about what you wrote and also wanted to clarify some things i said, especially because my comments were absolutely not intended to diminish the exceptional work you made in any way, nor did i meant to just "put a stamp" on it! Often i find it difficult to express my thoughts in this foreign tongue and struggle to find just the right words or the right "tone".

- First of all, i don't claim any sort of objective standpoint from which i could talk about, or even "judge" these matters. It's just my personal (though not my "own") view, nothing more.
- The question of "originality" or "distinctiveness" with regard to style is a rather difficult one for me. I wrote about my view on this before, and i think it always tends to swing between two poles: On the one hand every single piece of work from every single artist is "original" in some way or the other. On the other hand, i think, something like absolute originality or a totally individual style is an illusion. Due to the shared cultural cosmos we all inhabit, one cannot avoid to work with the "stuff" already at hand that predates ourselves, whether consciously or subconsciously, because there is just nothing else to draw from beside it! Ofc it becomes interesting (for me at least), when these two sides "come together" and by chance something "new" emerges from (necessarily) working with the "old" stuff.
- So i think it really lies in the eye of the observer and her or his interpretative frames, whether the emphasis is more on the one or the other. I think it's possible to trace some sources of inspiration, known styles or elements in even the "most creative and original" pieces (and thereby "classify" it and put it in some kind of order or "bag"), as it is possible to trace the slightest individual nuances in a seemingly "generic" piece. In my view it also depends a lot on different traditions or "disciplines" of perceiving, especially when it comes to "art". I think it is a rather recent trend in the history of cultural production not to strive for "perfection in emulation", but to put emphasis on individual style and the "genius" artist who, kissed by the muses, creates masterpieces of Art (capital A intended) "ex nihilo".
Btw., a wonderful depiction of a "clash" of these rivaling paradigms or worldviews can be found in Orhan Pamuk's novel My Name is Red .

Getting back to your work, i want to make sure that the comparison i made with torstan's maps was, as said above, not intended to "put you in his shadow" or to downplay the uniqueness of your stunningly beautiful map. To say it with the words of Poole (1986): "Difference makes a comparative analysis interesting; similarity makes it possible". And i'd add, if one sees similarities, comparison is always "on board" already. Well, no worries i'm not going for a full comparative analysis here (although your map would surely deserve one!) , but i want to try explain, how i came to this comparison in the first place.
- The most striking similarity for me, and why i even mentioned it, is the wonderful palette for the different climates, the smooth transition of colors and the subtle yet impressive texturing. For me the colors and tones of a map make up the biggest part of the overall "atmosphere" or flair of it and thereby have a huge impact on my first impression.
- As it happened to be, due to his official depiction of "the lands of ice and fire", i think torstan's maps are among the most widespread fantasy maps around and have (rightfully!) a somewhat "iconic" status in our field. His series of absolutely awesome mapping tutorials fostered this status even more and so, understandably, these maps have become a sort of template for many fantasy cartographers. But thereby they also became an established point of reference for comparison (at least for me) with other maps, old and new.
I'm really not sure, but maybe these are some of the reasons why this style, unlike many others as you rightly observed, is often so clearly associated with one person?
- Many people use this (or a pretty similar) color palette and style for their maps lately, but i think in many aspects your Kaherm and Leth maps come so close to the "original", that it is difficult (for me at least) not to evoke the image of let's say the "An Ember in the Ashes" map or the "Rhune" map and thereby automatically comparing them. Other aspects, for example your wonderful mountainranges and the more "clean" linework in general, are rather different and i personally find them even more pleasing . So, my initial comment, that i would like to see "more" of your own fingerprint on your future maps, was a bit misleading, since there already are so many of your own fantastic "fingerprints" on your map!
- Again, i think it's perfectly fine and absolutely nothing wrong with "emulating" other peoples style (or parts of it), given the artist him/herself has no problems with it. I only think it will always bear the risk (or reward? it's depending on the perspective i guess ) of being compared with the artist(s) "already known" for this style by third parties.

Sorry for the huge textwall Voolf, just be assured that i look forward to seeing more of your wonderful maps. Keep up the great work!

Cheers,
AL

[Voolf]

Oh Abu, that is way to much to take in .

Ok but seriously, maybe my answer was too harsh too. Did not wanted to sound like angry with you or anything. It's just that when you hear "Oh nice torstan-like map" all the time, you start to wonder, if this is still a praise or maybe not so much. Sometimes i think people consider my maps as a mere copy of torstan's, but maybe i overinterpret it.

[jfrazierjr]

I am going to do a test in the CL forums, but from what I see on the thread screen, we can include 25 tags.


So adding:

2017
Jan 2017

both would allow for the best of both worlds when people do it(or we CL's do it for them). I don't see any reason why a properly built query could not query one the other or both depending upon what one is looking for as the thread tags.

For example:

Link number 1 : Find me all threads in the finished maps forum with the tag 2017
Link number 2 : Find me all threads in the finished maps forum with the tag Jan 2017

the first link could be titled "All makes posted to the Finished Maps forum in 2017
while there would then be 12 individual ones for each specific month in 2017

granted, I don't know the software specifically, but i am a developer by trade who works in the web software industry(though back end systems, not font end browser UI stuff)

[ChickPea]

That will work. It just means adding two tags instead of one. You can use the Advanced Search feature if you want to search multiple tags at once.

EDIT: probably best if we remove all future tag discussion out of Voolf's post and into another thread. Sorry again for the hijack, Voolf!