Hand-drawn maps: just scan them or retrace them?

[Wired]

Hello, fellow ladies and gentlemen,
I've recently started to make use of downtimes at work by drawing maps for fun and practice. Now my question would be: if you digitalize your hand-drawn maps, do you just scan them, or do you retrace what you've drawn and rework it? Yesterday, I did upload the first of those hand-drawn maps here. I'm actually quite happy with how it turned out, given I had no room to make corrections, but I'd like to know how those of you who have made this more often do handle this?

[Blaidd Drwg]

I scan my hand-drawn stuff all the time. What do you mean by "retrace"? Retrace them digitally?

[Elterio Delgard]

Personally, I prefer to scan it. I must admit that digitalizing or retracing a map sounds a little abstract to me, but if you spend much effort on hand drawing, why would you afterwards RETRACE it?
I looked at your map on the other forum. I can hardly tell its handmade due to sharp constrast between black and white. If you do not mind having the end result fall in between hand made and computer made (what I mean is you draw by hand and then heavily correct or modify the image on your computer) then I would say a detailed sketch would suffice for the pen and paper part, doing the rest on the computer.

If you wish to keep a hand made touch, I strongly recommend you to embrace to a certain degree the imperfections your sheet will accumulate as you manipulate it. Its just my opinion though.

OH!!! Really important! Scanned versions of your hand drawn maps won't have the same dimensions as your original paper map. What I mean is be aware you may loose details on the margins depending on the scanner you have. If you look at my thread ''six maps open for critics '', the first image I posted you can see six papers with borders. The borders are 1cm wide, may it be up, down, left or right. By doing so I was able to scan multiples maps and merge them. Its quite useful if your intent may be to enlarge or expand your world. This is the downside of scanning, more work to ensure a maintenance of the scale. Trust me, many things are frustrating, but one of the most annoying is to print something only to realize it lacks some details. Its not a big problem per say, you can simply rescan, but if you have a scanner like mine, its annoying.

[rdanhenry]

It depends on the map. If it is twenty years old and pencil-drawn, it probably isn't going to give you a great scan and redoing it digitally is going to improve the results. If you get a beautiful scan, why would you alter it? Odds are, for most maps, you'll want to do some digital touch up of the scanned map, either because the scanning process didn't quite capture what you had, or because there is something in the original art that could use repair. If you plan to scan a drawn map and you aren't an ace letterer, you likely want to save labeling for the digital version. I am moving towards drawing on paper, then cleaning up my scans, then coloring digitally. Digital color takes longer, but it is much easier to make it consistent, and getting colors correct in scans is significantly harder than scanning line art.