Hello Guild members

[Mutant Lord]

Greetings from the frost bitten woodlands of interior British Columbia, Canada!

I've been wanting to get involved in this site since the moment I came across it many months ago.. just had to complete my new Portfolio site and ditch the old commercial design career. I've been doing a ton of freelance RPG and commercial illustration for the past few years, but have finally made the leap to going full time as a freelance fantasy and SF artist.
Producing fantasy maps has been one of my biggest joys in this line of work, and something I've done since I was a little kid, and then plenty of as a game master for nearly 20 years. While I work both digitally and traditionally, depending on the job, I tend to do all my maps by hand, even the 3d sculpted ones.

I am very excited to finally post here and be part of something that I am so interested in. To see so many others into speculative cartography is fantastic; the talent pool here is something that others (art directors) need to be made aware of.

best regards,
Will / Mutant Lord

Oh, yeah, here is a link to my maps page on my new site...

http://www.mcauslandstudios.com/maps.htm

[ravells]

Welcome Will! And we're really happy and lucky to have someone with your talent joining as part of the community! I hope that you'll take a little time to help people like me with the modest efforts that we produce!

Great to have you on board - as you're an industry pro, Arcana, who runs the site will give you the moniker soon enough I expect.

Ravs

[Robbie]

Industry Pro indeed...its great to have ya aboard Will! Thats some phenomenal work ya have there, and its good to see another pro taking the artform to another level. Great use of illustration as well to enhance your maps!

[RPMiller]

I'll add my welcome here as well! Will you do some extraordinary work. I love the clay maps that you produce. That is an entirely unrepresented medium here and I have to say one that really stands out. Beautiful work!

[NeonKnight]

FROZEN BITTEN INTERIOR OF BC!

Come now, ain't that cold in Kamloops right now! I'm originally from Prince George and I think it gets colder there!

But welcome to the Boards! I live in the Sunny Lower Mainland now myself!

Glad to have you aboard!

[pyrandon]

Will--It's great to have you here. I came across your old site some time ago and yoinked oh, about a dozen or more of your works to place in my "awesome references" folder. (In fact, last May I posted you here at the Guild as a "recommended resource"; see http://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=538)

So glad you're here--and your enthusiasm for both the genre and this site thrills me. Welcome!

[Mutant Lord]

Thank you for the warmest welcome I’ve ever had on a forum! I’ll certainly have to let fellow artists and some of my client publishers about this joint. Meanwhile I am going to spend a few hours checking out all the amazing maps your members have created. Truly a renaissance in cartography has emerged here.

I have a bunch of maps that I didn’t get to add to my site, due to time constraints and ongoing work on them, but seeing what’s been going on here, I think I will revisit that section of my portfolio. Map illustration makes up about a quarter of all the work I do for RPG companies.

I wonder, does anyone here do maps for novels? You know, those little ink things in the front of most fantasy books.

Anyhow, thanks again for the reception, now, to cruise about the site...
Regards,
Will

PS. No, it’s not that frosty in Kamloops just yet, but we live in the mountains outside and the frost has killed most of our garden so far this year. Prince George, B.C., which is considerably further north, gets more severe winters for sure.

[ravells]

There is huge room for improvement for many of the maps typically found in the flysheet of novels. One gets the impression that they are usually afterthoughts or drawn by the writer.

[RobA]

I'll chime in with a welcome as well, Will!

And I agree with Ravs that many of those flysheets come across as afterthoughts. I think that in come cases a novels is written without map in mind, then one is scribbled at the last moment because it is expected

And I must say, your clay (polymer clay?) maps (or more correctly, landscapes?) make beautiful textures (especially the mountains) that I have yet to seen well done in a 2D graphic package

Care to mention your setup for photographing them?

-Rob A>

[Mutant Lord]

For the big 3d hand crafted maps I used to get a photographer friend to shoot them with his Nikon D70, with just one light source so that the cast shadows from hills and mountains are more authentic. Although... if a planet was in a binary star system, I guess setting up two lights, near each other, would be correct.

I now have a D70 SLR digital camera and have tried my own photography, but my lighting system indoors is inadequate so I shoot outside in the early evening, around 7pm in the summer, to get a natural, warm light.

Once I get the map into Photoshop I clean up any errors in the painting process (I use acrylics), tweak rivers, and whatnot.

I think the next time I do one of these sculpted maps I will photograph all the steps and materials and post it here someplace to show how I do it. producing them is one of my favorite creative endeavors and I hope I get some more assignments for them soon.

Thanks everybody for the kind words and welcome.

I've contact my friend at The Geek Gazette to check this site out for a potential article. Check them out at: http://geekgazette.tripod.com/ ... drop them a line and tell them Will sent you.