City of Feenlicht WIP

[Ibn]

Hi there.

This is a work in progress map of the City of Feenlicht for a generic D&D Campaign i run.
It's almost entirely drawn from scratch in Photoshop. The faded out city in the background is the original map i built (and never finished) with glue, scissors and lots of copies of a map i found in a DSA Adventure. I scanned it and used it as template for the redraw. The gray lines are markers for the main streets.

Feenlicht is German and means faerielights. It's called that way because of two magic lights that always shine on those two islands to the west of Feenlicht acting as a natural lighthouses. The main city itself lies on a cliff about 100 meters over sea level. People and goods from the docks below are brought to the city via a great stairway, that is worked into the cliff (for the not so wealthy), or big elevators (for the rich).

It's gonna be a while till i finish it because I'm just learning to use Photoshop. So most of the things i do take forever. But i get better.

Comments are very welcome :)

[ravells]

I really like the pencil and paper feel to the map. Looking forward to seeing more! You may want to work in some graphical representation of the cliff if it's a such a prominent feature.

[pyrandon]

First off, welcome to the Guild!

I like the progress so far--very nice, especially for just learning PS (a daunting task, isn't it??)

Keep us posted on your progress!

[Ibn]

Thanks for the welcome. And yes. Learning PS is daunting at the least. ;)

I updated the map just a little bit. I tried to make a dominant feature just a wee bit more prominent. And i redone the temple in the middle of the city. The original was copied from the map i mentioned. But i wanted it to have the same look/style as the city walls. I'm going to do the same with the ships and populate the docks a little bit more.

[Yandor]

hehe your running into the same problem I had... have... I don't know the proper terms, I'm sure many will give you the right terms when they notice, but your mixing isometric elements with overview elements, both of which are two different styles, that in my opinion seem to clash. What I ended up doing was making it all isometric, so yeah... just my two cents...

[Ibn]

@yandor:
you're right. they do clash. and i'm not sure if i keep the cliff that way. i just have no idea how to make the cliff stand out in a non-isometric view.
but thanks to photoshop it's easy to undo the 3D-cliff by hiding the layers it's on. so no harm is done.
but now i'm coming close to the task of populating the city with buildings... and frankly... i'm a little bit intimidated by it.

[RobA]

This thread:
http://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=723

Has a tileable texture you can bring in, scaled appropriately to "fill in" areas (using a layer mask) of your city. It is a quick way to get a look happening - just apply a bevel/outer glow or some other layer effect to it to fit the map style.

There was another thread with a different fill, but I can't find it now...

-Rob A>

[AidyBaby]

Here's one I did a while ago (it's a .psd).

http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...?t=1019&page=3

[RobA]

That's the one I was looking for!

-Rob A>

[ravells]

Ah cool, that one is much better, I've copied across to the land/sea seamless fill sticky.