Map 04 - Cayad, Realm of the Carnelian God-Empress

[Will Phillips]

Oh man, I am absolutely loving the style and the worldbuilding you're working in here.

[J.Edward]

Man, this is looking so good Abu. Really.
Color is excellent. Your terrains are engaging and well drawn. What's not to like here?
I even like the text and font choices.

Is the realm desert? Or just looking that way right now? [might have missed you saying about this - lots to read lately ]
There is a strong appeal to the desert look, but that doesn't mean that it couldn't look just as good if it were jungles or grasslands.

[Diamond]

Really awesome, Abu. I really got nothin' to add at this point. Love the world-building, very bleak and cool.

[Barek333]

I agree, the labels look much better now. This is coming along nice, love your mountain style, one of the best ones on here. Plateau looks awesome...and you know what, I'll redo my map now. I also have a plateau and my mountains were just to small in comparison so screw it (the relative scale), I like em big so I'll make em big

Have a question. How do you upload such a high res picture? Mine is already too big while twice smaller in res. What format do you save in etc. Thnx

[- Max -]

Thank you so much for all the wonderful feedback! I greatly appreciate it.
@ Barek: I put a slight dark outer glow around the labels. I like them a lot more now, what's your opinion?

Notorious weakness in grasping a proper step-by-step workflow and the conceptual premiss to create a landscape loosely related to the laws of nature drove me way down south. To the plains of Duun: There it started all...
Would love to hear your honest opinion if this is not way too ... well you know... it starts with "c" and ends with "heesy"?

The Ktlaq Homelands are termite-mound-like mountains where the carnelian God-Empress resides in her gigantic palace ... like Mordor ... with insects ^^. The plateau with the bloodstone in the centre is indeed a bit "in your face", but hey, i'm going for high fantasy in a deserty setting .

The Kamaad Plateau and the plains of Duun are home to various human tribes. First they saw the coming of Yshtar as a sign of doom and turned against her. When she came back with legions of zealous Ktlaq warriors, they gave it a second thought...
Nowadays Carn is the spiritual center of Cayad and a place of pilgrimage for all beings in the realm

Not entirely sure about the idea to place some story elements on the map, but there is just so much space with this scale.

Apropos scale, cayadian cartographers tend to represent the important sites on their maps bigger than they actually are. The masters in Azuredawn are usually not very pleased by this habit, but it is common knowledge among endless generations of cayadian map-makers, that it's much better to make your colleagues laugh about you, than to incur the wrath of the God-Empress...

Cheers,
AL

Looks grat Abu ! not sure if you saw it (in my thread) but I offered you to provide you my border layers so ours will match perfectly. Just e-mail me at maximeplasse[at]yahoo[dot]com

[snodsy]

Great job Abu, your setting the bar high. The Carn definitely looks like a birthing of some sort. Great job so far.

[Abu Lafia]

Oh man, I am absolutely loving the style and the worldbuilding you're working in here.

Thank you Will! Gives me motivation to work further on it.

Man, this is looking so good Abu. Really.
Color is excellent. Your terrains are engaging and well drawn. What's not to like here?
I even like the text and font choices.

Is the realm desert? Or just looking that way right now? [might have missed you saying about this - lots to read lately ]
There is a strong appeal to the desert look, but that doesn't mean that it couldn't look just as good if it were jungles or grasslands.

Thanks a lot John. You never stop inspiring me with your amazing sense for subtle color-palettes (and many, many other things), so your praises are highly appreciated and make me quite happy! I thought about the hinterland as a rather arid plains/steppe/savannah and desert region, because of the mountain range near the coast, where it's more tropical (well, geography isn't my strength, but i think it's rather reasonable in this latitudes). For now i only broadly colored some areas and left the (indeed somewhat desert-like) background as it was. I like it as a background in the north too, even if it isn't depicting desert there. Have to see, whether i'll color the actual desert regions a bit different later.

Really awesome, Abu. I really got nothin' to add at this point. Love the world-building, very bleak and cool.

Thanks Diamond, it's always a bit of a pain for me to write stuff in english. Lacking the mother-tongue feeling for the language makes it often hard to express what i want to say (in a somewhat aesthetically pleasing way at least ). With the many phrases, metaphors and rare words i have in my german mind to describe things, dictionaries and good old google are often just less than mediocre tools for translation...

I agree, the labels look much better now. This is coming along nice, love your mountain style, one of the best ones on here. Plateau looks awesome...and you know what, I'll redo my map now. I also have a plateau and my mountains were just to small in comparison so screw it (the relative scale), I like em big so I'll make em big

Have a question. How do you upload such a high res picture? Mine is already too big while twice smaller in res. What format do you save in etc. Thnx

Thanks Barek, i'm flattered... But there are many more things to learn for me, before i'd call the mountains "best" or even "good" (besides the fact that i'm quite sceptical about comparing these things). I think they have a bit of a fraud like character to them. Yes they look flashy (i'm still quite surprised what happens on the canvas in front of me while drawing ) but i struggle every single time with perspective issues and the general consistency of the linework. When i try to convey it to other things than mountains i usually fail miserably ... well, i think "one-trick-pony" is the correct phrase for it.
About the Resolution: I work with gimp and exported it as .jpg. Its about 90% quality (compression?). I know when you export it with 100% quality even a .jpg file can become quite large. But the size decreases dramatically if you lower it by just some percents. I usually get problems with the 4.6 mb upload limit, if i have a ~7kx10k px canvas. But with this size (~3.4kx3.8k px) it shouldn't be a problem.

Looks grat Abu ! not sure if you saw it (in my thread) but I offered you to provide you my border layers so ours will match perfectly. Just e-mail me at maximeplasse[at]yahoo[dot]com

Thanks a lot Max! I already copy pasted the river from your map (forgot to mention it in the post), but i'll send you a mail nonetheless. Better to have the original layer in this case i guess

Great job Abu, your setting the bar high. The Carn definitely looks like a birthing of some sort. Great job so far.

Thanks a lot snodsy, greatly appreciated! I'm glad i could depict there what i had in mind.

[Barek333]

Well that one trick is quite good. Other things will come along. You cant master everything at once, and of course no one is ever done improving

And I realized my stupidity, I figured 100% compression means reducing it in size as much as possible. Boy do I feel stupid now

[Abu Lafia]

Glad it helped Barek!

Plateau looks awesome...and you know what, I'll redo my map now. I also have a plateau and my mountains were just to small in comparison so screw it (the relative scale), I like em big so I'll make em big

That's the spirit! (forgot to mention in the above post)

[DanielHasenbos]

It's looking very nice so far!

I had a question for you as well: I was browsing though the foreign relations archive, but it seems the records of the relations with 'Cayad, Realm of the Carnelian God-Empress' have been burned by dragons... How have we been doing in the past? I noticed a show of interest in me leaving the borders unprotected, but I'm not sure ;p

Keep doing what you're doing!

-Dan