Turn a realistic world map in hand drawn world map

[Elros]

Hello everyone!
I'm Elros, Max for those who want to call me that.

I will preface this by saying that I will ask questions about Adobe Photoshop:
For some time now I have been attempting to create a fictional world for my novels.
The file soon became too big and my 16GB of RAM could no longer handle it, which is why it lies half unfinished. The map is 21112 x 13041 Pixels and has an army of levels. The map has a very realistic style.

My questions are as follows:
How should I go about transforming it from the way it is now, to a “drawn” map?
What style should I use?
What level of detail to give it geographically?
Image frame size in Pixels?
I immediately thank those who will have the patience and courtesy to answer.

[waldronate]

Cartography is the art of abstraction to fulfill a purpose. You may find that several simpler maps (or layers on a simpler map) are much more useful than one map with every possible thing on it. Those maps would probably be much quicker to draw, as well.

Given that you have a "realistic" map (whatever that might look like) and you want a "drawn" map (whatever that might look like):

The style and level fo detail will both be dictated by what you want to show. If terrain is critical to the purpose of the map, do lots of terrain: if terrain is mostly incidental to the purpose of the map, a few scribbles with a label that says "The Mountainiest Mountains That Are Totally Impassable Except Through This One Commonly-known Pass And This Specific Goblin Warren" convey more than many, many detailed mountain renderings. If your map is mainly about some cities/important locations and the journeys between them, then stuff at the fringes of the map away from the important elements will be far less useful and might include fanciful notes like "here be dragons" or frilly borders and artwork that depicts important story elements.

The medium in which you intend to publish your map will suggest how many pixels you need. A map for a 720p 100 dpi screen viewed at a meter away will be much lower resolution than a 1200 dpi full-color wall poster that's two meters wide. I recommend making the map a bit higher resolution than you expect that you will need because it's much easier to downsample than upsample.

[Elros]

Thank you for your response.
Well I was thinking of a map showing the location of the continents, maybe trading ports and cities near the sea.

Would you have any examples?

[waldronate]

The Finished Maps section of the Guild here ( https://www.cartographersguild.com/f...splay.php?f=36 ) has thousands of maps that can be useful as inspirational examples.

[Tiana]

A map like that is much too big for a novel.

Consider that an average novel is 6x9 inches. Let's say you do a 2 page spread, so you can work with a total area of 12x9 inches. Since it's for print, it should be 300 pixels = one inch wide. So it would be 3600x1800 inches.

The best way to figure if this will work for your novel is to zoom out so that you're looking at it the same size it would be in your novel. Is it still legible? Is the vital information showing?

When you make a novel map, it should first and foremost tell you what places are in the story. The whole world doesn't matter if the story takes place in the Capital of Kingspass and the surrounding valley and mountain pass and you name a total of 8 surrounding landmarks. You'd put only those landmarks. Lord of the Rings has a region that shows the journey, Game of Thrones has two continents because they do visit another continent. Both of these settings have presumably larger worlds, but the story isn't concerned with EVERYTHING on the world.

That world map is for you.

You transform it by drawing it again, this time with the purpose and scale in mind. Redo it all. What you made will be only useful for reference and 80%-90% of it is too much detail for a novel map. I suspect the majority of what you've included is far beyond what you need for your actual book. For the record, the map you made would print at around 70 inches wide on the long end, which is why it's killing your computer. If you genuinely wanted a 40x70 print of your world map, the way to handle it is vector. Even with a pretty good computer, I stop doing raster at about 24x36 (standard poster size).

This size is only useful for your reference, and it's too big for your computer to handle. Downscale it by like... 50% if you want to keep going on that file to finish it, and you're still going to have a standard poster print size.

I looked at your post history.

I saw you made this map. https://www.cartographersguild.com/a...9&d=1560444648

So I'm going to use this for reference.

That map's terrain content is suitable for placing in a book, but the text is much too small. It needs to be 3-4x bigger.

It's also too dark to print well. A map for a book should be drawn in black and white with high contrast. But the amount of terrain content would work well.

Think of what a reader wants. They're not sitting there with a ruler being "aha this is exactly 24 kilometers away!" they're looking to see "ah, the city of Highgarden is in the eastern mountains, okay, and the party travels along these mountains to get to Riverwarden, at the mouth of River Serpentine, close to the sea and the break in the mountains where the war takes place is here. So the hills to the far east, that's where the orc army came from..."

If you want more content on a book map than this, you should probably make more than one map. I prefer to have no more than 20-30 labels on a single novel sized book page map.