April 2022 Challenge - Dau

[Tiana]

When I saw the challenge was Water I knew I wanted to at least start on a map of Dau, as in the conlang the city's name: Dau, is literally "water". This city is know for its river, as the city has a beautiful waterfall spilling into its valley, above which a nearly immortal settler has made their farm and over time, a town has sprouted up around her continual presence. Saerin Vilanar is hailed as the defacto mayor of Saerintown which is now more of Saerin District (a moniker she deeply dislikes) as Dau has grown immensely since she settled here and began to farm. This represents an important section of core Vilanar family territory, where on the shores of the great lake Riana, they keep the "Vilanar basement" (an underground lair for their dark science magic—zhekeishaf!)

Then I went and started ironing out the conscript and con labels and this is where I got to. The labels in Ekaeli are not pure ciphers of English, but written in the Ekaeli word... for example everything labelled "town" is actually "eman" (Ei: Saerintown = Saerineman" in the script.

Behold Saerin and Xan's farm yard in my signature if you want more! Also have a few other maps from this setting, but if I add any other images to this post the scraper won't get the right one for the challenge entry.

If you try to decypher what I was writing, know that some letters are conjunctions, vowels are mostly done as those little floats (always read as the vowel following the consonant it's positioned above) with the exception of a capitalizing grammar rule which has a few capital vowels appear within a word, and if someone's interested in it I can provide the cipher sheet, just as I said, can't put 2 images in the post with the WIP scraper.

Ended up making it a contour map because the height levels in this area are fairly important to my visualization.

### Latest WIP ###
dau (almaera).jpg

It's not really done done but it's where I'm at so far.

[Tiana]

More work on the underlaying art, more streets for the little towns, simple border experiment (color relates to the magic system) and I tried to render out the waterfall a bit better.

### Latest WIP ###
dau (almaera) 2.jpg

[Tiana]

Okay, well, there were a few things I wasn't satisfied with like the road legibility, plus I hadn't added farm related roads.
### Latest WIP ###
dau (almaera) 3.jpg

[Diamond]

That's really gorgeous and unique. You really created something interesting here.

[Tiana]

That's really gorgeous and unique. You really created something interesting here.

Thanks, Diamond, that's kind of you to say! It's based on many years of lore now, and it bums me out that I don't have a ton of time to do too many maps for my own setting in between commissions.

[Simkin]

As Diamond aready said, your maps are really artistics, and I like them as always

[Tiana]

Thanks, Simkin, I appreciate it.