Tambol Archipelago - WIP worldbuilding with hand drawn and watercoloured maps

[OldEarth]

I'm building a science-fantasy world with some steampunk elements along with some more far future science fiction elements hidden in the world to run some RPG fun in. I'm still working out the details of the peoples and haven't made a ruling on whether I want it to be an all-human world or not. But I'm making progress on the mapping and I keep getting excited about my progress steps and where better to share those than here?

My first map of the entirety of the Tambol Archipelago (done on the cover of my RPG notebook):
TawoldArchipelego.jpg

City of Anoka - the capital city of Andalla:
Anoka-small.png


Nation of Andalla (Updated to final):
Andalla.png

[XCali]

Oooh! Nice. I like the painterly look.

Question, is your line art pencil or pen? It seems pencil with the faded line parts.

[OldEarth]

Thanks!

The linework is in pen. I use a combination of waterproof fountain pen inks with a fine tip nib and pigma micron for finer detail and expanded colour options.

I find the fountain pen to be really helpful for line weight and some degree of shading.

[OldEarth]

Made progress so seems like a good time to put in the steps so far to get to where I am with Andalla. If anyone has any tips or comments I'm always happy to get feedback especially if they help make things easier on me or look better in the end.

STEP 1: I started with my zoomed out map of the Archipelego as shown in the original post. So I transferred the major settlements and features from that to the new, more zoomed in scale maintaining the measured distances (going from the, admittedly weird, scale of 1:13,300,000 to 1:2,500,000) and drew in the rough coastline based on the original design:

20180520_174442.jpg

STEP 2: Next step was to wobble that coast line to add in that detail some more and add in the major river courses and some islands. Still working completely in pencil (using a 2H lead) I've darkened the line in the photos so that it's easier to see but I keep it pretty light at this stage.

Andalla 2.jpg

STEP 3: Partially through additional coastline and river detail (notice that this time I'm darkening the line somewhat. Still fairly light and enhanced in the photo but more definite than previous pencilling). I've also started sketching in the mountain range:

Andalla 3.jpg

STEP 4: More mountains and starting to ink. The coastline/mountain ink is De Atramentis Document Ink - Brown. The black ink is a Pigma Micron 0.001. I deliberately use a light water-soluble blue ink for the rivers (Staedtler fine-liner) because I want it to dissolve into the watercolour and basically disappear but I like to have it inked initially so that I have something to guide me and I can erase the pencil that would otherwise show through the transparent watercolour:

Andalla 5.jpg

STEP 5: This is where I was at when I first posted my in-progress (now updated with my latest progress)

Andalla 7.jpg

I forgot to get a photo at full inked stage unfortunately but because this post is already long enough I'll start a new one with the start of the watercolouring

[OldEarth]

Once I have it completely inked I erase the pencil and break out the watercolour. I make a dilute blue wash and start painting around the coastlines first and avoiding where I have labels, once this first wash is dry I start again with the same wash but expand my coverage a little - this results in the water being darker around the coast with a lighter border and lighter wash over labels. I also carefully fill in rivers. You'll notice there's a weird colouration around the rivers, settlements, labels and some mountain tops in this photo - this is from masking fluid that I apply with a cheap brush (because it really does destroy the brush) just to make life easier on me while I do the colour washes for the land. It's extra time upfront but means that I can be less focused on careful detail preservation during the rest and I'm less likely to curse at myself for accidently painting over things:

Andalla 9.jpg

For the land this time I decided I was going to keep the colour palette simple so I made up a brown-parchment-ish coloured wash for most of the land and a Payne's grey wash for the mountains. In this case, I started by doing a light wash over all the areas I wanted to have colour and then adding extra layers where I wanted darker - in this case around coastline and hills:

Andalla 10.jpg

Once I'm happy with my washes I remove the masking fluid and now I'm ready to get to clean-up and detailing:

Andalla 11.jpg

And that's where I'm at currently

[OldEarth]

And I think I'm done... unless I notice any other touch-ups I want to do....

Basically touched up some of the painting, added colour to the settlement markers added line-work to the rivers so that they are better defined, added roads, water routes and provincial borders. Then touched up the neatline with an added scale border, touched up the title and north arrow and finished and added a frame for the legend. Overall I'm fairly pleased with the results. I think I went a little darker on the grey than I would next time and I would maybe give the grey a warmer undertone so that it blended more with the land than with the water.

Andalla_small.png

[XCali]

I really enjoyed seeing your step by step.
Also, I like how your mountains pop out of the map, like behold! Mighty mountain range.

[AaronSchmidt]

I love your work!!!

[The Lazy One]

Loving the inking!

[OldEarth]

I really enjoyed seeing your step by step.
Also, I like how your mountains pop out of the map, like behold! Mighty mountain range.

Thanks! That was part of my goal with this style of mountains so I'm glad it worked!

I love your work!!!

Thank you!

Loving the inking!

Thanks! I love ink so it's nice to indulge... I also just decided to get a few different dip pen nibs... so I'm going to be doing some experimenting with those now too