Merelan City

[Mouse]

Hey Mouse, love what you have done here. And i would never have guessed that it is a CC map.
The colors are great and i also love the layout and the little details (like the windmills). A very atmospheric city map. Not sure if i can Rep. you yet (probably not :-/) but i'll try. Well done!

Thanks Eilathen. Your comments alone are much appreciated

Great map and a master piece, Mouse. It's incredible what you can do with CC . I guess it's a relief to finish such a city map, the wip thread is one of the longest I see in this forum, besides those of vorro . Deserve all the rep I can give .

Thanks Warlin I get on with CC3+ quite well. There are many similarities between it and CorelDraw (which is a vector graphics package - not to be confused with Corel Photopaint). I've been using CorelDraw for the last 20 years, and also AutoCAD, which, may have given me an unfair advantage at the outset over people who grew up with raster graphics software. However there are quite a few CC3 artists who's work would put my tortoise-like progress to shame.

And since we're talking about progress... Like I said earlier - the WIP is just too much of a monster read for it to be the slightest bit kind of me to send anyone there! Not unless they really annoy me

[- JO -]

Ahhh !
The final result is so great !

Cheers for your work and for your tenacity ! You went through so much during the making of this map... and the result is so beautiful and so "alive" !!!!!

I'll rep you again as soon as I can !!!

[Mouse]

Hey Jo! Good to hear from you buddy Long time no see!

You're right - it was quite a voyage in the end, but Merelan City has finally arrived. I hope you noticed your boats are still there in the harbour and fishing the coast?

Thanks for the praise

Maybe we will see some more of your maps before too much longer

[ThomasR]

Very impressive. And definitely worth the time spent on perfecting the masterpiece

[Mouse]

Aw thanks thomrey

Its certainly the very best work I could do, and to hear so many people call it a masterpiece - especially you, its like winning a gold medal.

Thank you

[ThomasR]

Don't say this, we're bound to progress. Partake in the challenges and you'll see your skills evolve quickly. It's just like writing, constraint creates freedom

[Mouse]

I was thinking of entering a floating island in the current Lite Challenge, but my vision was a bit too similar to an existing entry, and I couldn't make up my mind whether it was an original creation of mine, or an idea I had as a result of looking at that particular entry, so I decided it was best to give it a miss this time just in case all I was doing was using someone else's ideas instead of my own, and wait to see what comes up next time

I hope its something where I can draw inspiration from dreams that I know are my own.

[ThomasR]

I had the same problem with this challenge when I saw Abu Lafia's piece but I realized that the similarities between us two would be balanced by the differences. With some challenges, we're doomed to come up with ideas that might come from the same family but I'm sure you can take the same linework and end up with very different maps from two different cartographer (hell, from the same cartographer too !) just by playing with color, shading or labeling.

Even if you do not enter the challenge, give it a go, the theme is too cool to pass

[Mouse]

LOL! I was talking about Abu's piece myself,

As it happens I do have a floating island of the more conventional type that floats in the sea in book 2, but with all the borrowing that's been going on (so far I've found 25 of my MC WIP maps on people's Pinterest boards - all without permission or proper credit) I'm a bit reticent to show it until I'm done with book 1, or Lord only knows where it will have gotten itself by the time I get around to hauling it back by the scruff of its neck to sit with the parent book on my author's webpage!

I might do a non-book related island, though. I'll see how the mood takes me when I settle again. Finishing MC has put me in a bit of a muddle. I hadn't realised just how much of my daily routine was based around 'doing the map'.

[Abu Lafia]

Wow, this map came a long way and turned out absolutely stunning Mouse! Great to see it finished. One can see all the effort you put into it. Have some well deserved rep!
Regarding this month's lite challenge you and Thomas were talking about, i wrote a bit about my views on the topic of "originality" in my thread, because Wired was hesitating to enter the challenge too, since his ideas about his challenge entry were similar to my entry. I just feel that worrying too much about the originality of one's ideas, actually limits the creativity/ creative process itself a lot. I generally hesitate to claim "Originality" (with a capital O) for things i produced, since i'm always aware, that the elements/ideas the piece is consisting of, preceeded me and my particular "bricolage" of them. On the other hand do i totally understand that things get way more tricky, if money, existence and identity is involved. Don't get me wrong, i find the cases of plainly "copying and reselling" works you mentioned the other day, absolutely problematic as well, but i think it is something different.