Reply With QuoteI absolutely love the style/colours of this map!
WIP- Personal map, detail
As some of you know, i've been working on a huge scale map of a fantasy world for myself. I work on it in spurts, as I'm a professional illustrator, and client work comes first, which means often there's no creative energy left to work on my own stuff.
I'm not sure I've posted this update before, but here is the Kingdom of Gyles. It's a small kingdom, somewhat isolated by difficult terrain surrounding it. This gives it some protection from larger kingdoms, but it's location makes it where trade ships don't often feel a need to call to port when traveling the East/West sea trade routes. So Gyles has never been a prosperous kingdom. It has no major export or wealth. The land is decent for farming and produces plenty for the people of Gyles, but not enough to make it worth any serious Merchants time.
To the west are several mountain ranges, with a large valley between them. Kobolds infest the mountains, and lead raids into the towns of Gyles. Wyverns also are common in the valley, which is why it is named after them. Sometimes kobolds will steal the eggs of the wyverns and raise them as steeds. There is a guild of assassins that also uses wyverns from this area as steeds.
There is rumor of a dragon living in Firedrake peak, but there haven't been any such sightings in over a decade. To east, are the haunted lands of the Ghoulbone hills. Legend has it to be the site of a battle that a battle from ancient history took place. It's also said the land is cursed. Any who dwell too long in the hills, are cursed to become ghouls, scouring the land to find bones of the fallen soldiers to survive on. There seems to be some truth to this, as next to the hills are old barrow mounds so old the carvings on the entrances are long worn away. But there are plenty of stories of ghostly funeral processions about the area.
To the north is a dry barren area, called the Razorrock Wastes. Large sharp jagged rocks create a maze like effect, that is very difficult to travel through. Not to mention that this is the breeding ground for bulettes, or land sharks.
All in all, Gyles is actually a peaceful quite kingdom. They do well for themselves, and other then the raids from Kobolds, people live well with each other. The population consists mostly of humans and halflings, with several gnome communities.
Last edited by TimPaul; 03-01-2016 at 02:20 PM.
I absolutely love the style/colours of this map!
Love! This is beautiful.
"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams"
Isn't it always amazing how your personal work tends to outshine your professional work? It's understandable since you often have to deal with multiple voices.
Looking back at this, I think I'm going to redo some of the forest areas. I've been researching different tree shapes, and forest composition. I think I want a wider range of shapes, rather then just broadleaf and conifer. So that way I can give a wider feeling of different kinds of forest areas and variety, find something that is inbetween the darkness of the conifers and the current broadleaf. And something for tropical.
Looks awesome! Interesting story too.
can you take us through a little on how you made it and what tools you used? thanks
Glad to see you working on this! I really like your color choices, it's original and works well.
I used Painter program, Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. The reasons being certain tools give better control in different applications.Originally Posted by Anna Robinson
can you take us through a little on how you made it and what tools you used? thanks
For example, Painter has better natural brushes, using fractal based formulas, compared to Photoshop's pixel based repeating patters.
Painter also has a better object nozzle, which is great for things like trees. I can draw 10-15 different trees, make a nozzle brush, set the variance ranges (size scale, tilt shift), and then paint in the trees. I can then go and tweak things afterwards.
The base of the world, I mostly did in Painter and then took into Photoshop to tweak the colors, because Photoshop does that better and easier.
I created various icons in Illustrator, so they would be vector based, and I could experiment with size, without losing definition. And then brought them into InDesign.
I'm using InDesign for the text, because it gives you better control for text. And it's easier to organize.
I worked many years as a production artists for publishing (I still temp now and then at Tor Books, and Orbit Books), so my process might be a bit more involved then need be.
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