I made a little map over the past week. I never got round to starting a WIP thread, cos it seemed like every night when I stopped, I was halfway through some part and wanted to finish it before I posted. But when I did finish the next night, I'd immediately start on a new bit, and on it goes...

I decided recently to fully embrace vector art, instead of using a tablet, mostly cos I'm just not very good at hand-drawing and my lack of skill discourages me. So, I fired up Inkscape and set about making this. I'd intended to move it into Affinity Designer at some point, as I find that software a lot of fun to use, but I couldn't be bothered booting into Windows. Inkscape is great on Linux (better than on Windows, imho - a lot less crashy) and it coped magnificently with this map (seriously, there are over 10k cloned trees!!)

I had a lot of fun with this, and I think (hope!) it didn't turn out too badly for being made entirely in a vector graphics program. There's one very low opacity texture layer (one of Inkscape's filters) just to add a little bit of bump to some of the flat colour areas. I could have started importing parchment-style textures, but I wanted to see where I could get to purely with Inkscape.

My biggest problem with vector is that I've got to reign myself in when it comes to colour choices. There's something about vector makes me want to pick really strong, bold colours., something I'm not as inclined to do when working with Gimp/Krita. I had to force myself to tone it down a couple of times, and settled for a fairly traditional blue/green colour scheme. My NEXT map though....

yren-final.jpg