Hello, dear cartographers!
Dragori Games is launching a 5th edition supplement on Kickstarter in August. Here is a link to our previous campaign (a board game).
Dragons of Tanares book.png
We need a LARGE Fantasy Map of Downtown Imperial Capital. Here is a image of the world, and the city's location:
Tanares World Map - Imperial Capital highlighted.png
And here's a shot of the Imperial Capital (the map would not need to follow what we see below):
Imperial Capital - Up close.png
As you can see, we try to make our artistic content as superb high-quality as possible, hence the "Serious high-profile" in the thread's title.
SPECS:
Timing constraints: We need it done, or at least 90% finished, preferably by the end of June or beginning of July. This would be one of the main pieces used on sample chapters and other content necessary for advertising prior to the Kickstarter campaign.
Quality & Size: World-class professional quality, A2, required for print & web.
Copyright: Dragori Games will have unlimited rights to use the image for commercial purposes, the artist will have the right to exhibit the image as part of his portfolio but not to exploit it for commercial gain.
Scale: instead of saying X miles/inch, I think it is better to briefly describe what we have in mind:
The imperial capital is huge. If we try to show everything in a single map, all structures would be mere dots. Although jaw-dropping, Mike Schley's Waterdeep is NOT what we are trying to accomplish because it ends up being too "uniform," specially when we see the map from afar.
What we want, then, is to focus on the "noble" part of the Imperial Capital, where the main structures are found (Imperial Palace, Arena of Fate, a smaller Arena, the Heroes' guild, some taverns and hotels of different sizes, a port, a tower, an imposing statue, a garden, a pond, a market square, a church, etc etc.).
We want all of these structures to be visible and distinguished from one another, but they must occupy the smallest space possible so the map still looks like a "big city map." We also want streets that are wide enough for our graphic designer to insert street names in most of them.
I think that Alyssa Faden's Westfield is the scale that most resembles what we want to accomplish, because you can put a name on most streets and still easily distinguishing different buildings and areas.
Style: Aerial view - to make it fully "playable," - as colorful as possible without making it cartoonish, and as realistic as possible without making it monochromatic. Here are four examples, ordered by my personal preference:
Example 1
Example 2
Example 3
Example 4
I will also take a look at high-quality submissions that, despite not meeting the examples above, meet the description above.
Contact: my name is Dan (hello!) and I will look at posts in this thread. You can also send an email to an address that starts with my name and ends with my company's name (dragorigames) dot com.
Coming soon: we will also need isometric city maps with interesting features (we can even purchase reproduction and commercial rights to maps that are already made), and "squared" high-quality dungeon maps of a standard nature (castle, cave, dragon lair, etc.).
Thank you for your time!