February 2019 Challenge: Azelor Valley

[Greason Wolfe]

Sooooo, I was commisioned by Azelor to do a map of lands dominated by farmlands.

Doesn't sound too tough, right? I should be able to do that.

Map some farms

- A land dominated by farmlands
- Medieval fantasy or alien landscape
- It can be of any climate and style
- It needs to have a few villages
- It has to have at least 1 river.
- It has to have 1 castle dominating the surrounding lands.

Still didn't sound too tough, at least until I sat down and started working on it. Then I was like "Oh Boy!"

Scaling...My Bane. You see, I like proper scaling, even if I am terrible at it. I know, I know, scaling and detail don't always go hand in hand, and we usually have to sacrifice one (at least in part) for the other. Still, it's one of my peeves sometimes.

As I figure it, the map has to be detailed enough to show the castle (obviously), villages, and their associated farmlands. Okay, fine, local map it is. But wait, there’s more, it has to show a few villages, and, unless they’re packed in tight, that means I’m gonna need a few miles between them. Not quite a local map, but neither is it a regional map per-se.

So I figure the area depicted by the map can’t be too awfully large, maybe 35 to 50 square miles. That leaves room to keep the villages from sitting right on top of each other and still, hopefully, get a bit of detail into the mix. The crops (farms) will be the toughest part, I don’t want to just throw down some plow lines and call it good. I’d much rather use symbols to identify specific crops, but we’ll just have to wait and see how that works out.

Anywho....I fired up Terragen and started cycling through some random height fields until I found something vaguely resembling part of a valley, tweaked things in Wilbur and did a fast, dirty render to get a rough model of what I intend to draw. Also cranked up Inspiration Pad to generate a few names for villages (and possibly some important personages), threw those in approximately where they would be, and sketched in the rivers/creeks and lakes just to get a better feel for where everything would be. Got a long way to go, but here are the basics....

### Latest WIP ###
Azelor Valley - WIP 001.jpg

[Diamond]

Well heck, I like what you've got so far! Now you just have to finish it...

[Azélor]

It's a good start.

[- JO -]

Yes, very good start ! I'm curious about how you'll go from here : colors ? lineart ?

[Kellerica]

Hmm. Interesting. Never heard of Terragen before, it looks like it can get you some interesting results. Really looking forward to seeing where you'll take this.

[Ilanthar]

Nice mountains!

[ladiestorm]

you have me intrigued!!

[tainotim]

This is a really promising start. Following this

Cheers,
Karl

[Greason Wolfe]

So it was a pretty crazy/hectic week at work and I didn't have much of a chance to work on this. Hopefully things are settled down now and I can at least make some progress over the weekend. Gonna try to line art this, but not so confident with my abilities in that style, but it is supposed to be a challenge, right?

[Greason Wolfe]

Ugh! It took me way longer than I would have liked to find a method that got me close to what I was seeing in my head in terms of style for the mountains. For the most part I like the way it looks but it is a bit slow and tedious. Still, for your consideration/comments/suggestions....

### Latest WIP ###
Azelor Valley - WIP 002 - Mntn Testing.jpg