The New Empire

[Coyotemax]

This map was commissioned as a gift for Brian Libby, the author of Storm Approaching : Part One of MERCENARIES.

Storm Approaching is the first volume in the Mercenaries series: rulers, diplomats, knights, soldiers of fortune, and an adventuresome young woman in a medieval world.


Andiriel, befriended by a knight of the illustrious Sovereign Order, enters the Order's auxiliary services and finds herself on a strange mission leading to a challenging future in a job she hardly expects.

For those interested in a good Fantasy read, i will also bring across the following info:

My books are available at www.authorhouse.com, at Amazon, and at Barnes&Noble.
Storm Approaching: Part One of Mercenaries
Author: Brian Libby
Paperback
4/29/2009
AuthorSolutions
ISBN: 143894778X
ISBN: 9781438947785

(Note if you do get it directly from authorhouse, that helps him out a bit more than the other 2, but hey, getting the book at all is better than not getting it).

And to quote the author:

Anyone interested in finding out more about Storm Approaching can go to http://andiriel.blogspot.com, where various humorous articles and satire can be found as well as an excerpt from the novel.

I started off with reading the book itself, as the client was kind enough to send me a copy for research purposes. I loved the story, and that helped drive the inspiration. Finally I scanned in the sketched maps at the back of the book to use as a basis for the land shapes. The WIP thread is located here and I would like to thank the forum as a whole (with special thanks to Waldronate who slowed me down and got me to take a second look at the style I was using).

I have to say I loved working on this map - not only was I inspired by the story itself, but the method is something I had a lot of fun developing. The style is a mix of techniques from a textstyle tutorial and S. John Ross Technique plus a showing by Fluesopp and Ramah thanks to the automatic forest generator (of which all of my assistance in testing was performed through this map, heh)


Anyhow, I also had to shrink the map a fair amount for displaying on the forum, the original is 4800x6600 at 300dpi (16x22) (viewable at full size on DeviantArt). I am including a cropped version of the original so you can see the detail at full size as well. [Edit - The client has also sent me a photo of the final framed version as well!

Enjoy!