[WIP] Inner Sea map

[vorropohaiah]

I haven’t posted a WIP on here for some time. I don’t tend to show most of my commissions, and my personal maps haven’t had much that I can share before they’re done. This is something a bit more abitious, though.

Some of you might be familiar with my Cartographer’s Choice map, the Inner Sea. That map’s over 4 years old now and personally I think it’s really showing it’s age. I was only then starting to learn how to use Photoshop and was still experimenting with style. I’ve since moved on to a more modern style (both in terms of worldbuilding as well as the maps themselves), as can be seen from my Atlas Elyden thread. I’m enjoying the work that goes into those atlas maps, though the topography and stitching that needs to be done to incorporate the maps into a larger whole is quite time-consuming.

My efforts so far have seen me map various parts of the Inner Sea region I had explored originally 4 years ago. So I’m going to take what I’ve done on these maps (the first was created in January this year) and apply that to a new map of the Inner Sea, depicting a slightly smaller area than that first version (I’ll be omitting the area of the Dark Sea in the bottom right to really concentrate on the Inner Sea itself.

I’m currently working on the topography, which is the most time-consuming part of the project. I’m probably half done by now, and am busy working on a region of dense mountains which is taking a long time to get done. Other than that i still need to tinker with the ‘finished’ areas to get them looking a bit more natural. Once that’s done I’ll be able to concentrate on rivers before getting things like borders and labels done.

I’ll be working at A1 size at 400 dpi on this one, with an eye to getting it printed as a poster. I’ll later resize it to A3 and relabel (removing less important labels as necessary to accommodate the smaller size) for my Atlas Elyden project. Work may be slow, because of this:

Capture.PNG

I intend on keeping the same colours as the atlas maps, though I might weather the map a bit, to make it look used.

This is what I have ready so far, in terms of Topography. Keep in mind I;ve had to resize the image from 400 dpi all the way down to 80 dpi, due to the size limits on uploads. Many regions are still rough (particularly the south and south western areas of the map), with just the first layer of topography finished (like in the south east):

topo - stitch - small.jpg

To anyone wondering, the topography is done 100% by hand and none of it is generated. Each level of topography is a separate layer in Photoshop, filled with the respective colour and given a hide all mask that’s painted white and given a 1px dark brown stroke.

More details on how the map is generated can be found on a tutorial I posted, here