August 2011 Entry - Fort Pilot

[vman3force]

After getting so much positive feedback from last month, I thought I might start taking part in more of these challenges. Its good for my mapping muscles. Probably wont be able to as much after school starts back up, but I've got big plans for then too, which you'll hear about later.

Anyways, for this one I thought I'd do something kind of personal. I come from North Carolina, home to many mountains. One of my childhood favorites is this very strange one called pilot mountain. It's always seemed kind of surreal, and there are mystical stories surrounding it and the native Cherokee indian tribes.

So I was thinking of that and I've been thinking about Fallout and retro-futurism a lot; I decided to use it as the location for some kind of cold war-esque military station, like a satellite relay outpost or something. A little photoshopping today produced this:

fort pilot 1.jpg

And here's my first draft of the base of the map, using a park guide map and a topographical map as reference:

fort pilot topo.jpg

And I realize that the shadows of the mountains dont match up entirely with the topographical lines - I was using two different maps as reference for those elements so I'll have to go back and negotiate them into agreement with one another.
Its a start, I suppose. Not entirely sure where Im going to go with it, maybe some kind of declassified secret intelligence document or something. We'll see.