Fictionalised Catskills map

[ravells]

I'm doing a commission for a chap who is writing a scenario for 'Fight On' Magazine. It's a 1920's period road map of part of the Catskills area in New York where the names have been changed. Here it is so far - many of the names are place fillers and will be changed.

Suggestions for things to put on the map and general C&C welcomed.

cheers

Ravs

p.s. as this is a commissioned piece please don't republish it elsewhere.

[Hai-Etlik]

The trees and some of the lakes look a bit blurry and pixelated. Also the smooth blurred halos around the text don't look quite right for a lithograph, you might try a smaller, hard edged halo instead. You also have some features poking out from behind the border in the northwest.

Overall it looks more like topographic map than a road map, though I suppose early road maps probably started out as repurposed topo maps. It might be a good idea to try to find a symbolization for the forest and contours that doesn't have one covering up the other. Neither is really that important to a straight road map, but having both you don't want one being rendered unreadable by the other.

[TregMallin]

Yog Shogoth County? Oh my! I don't want to walk down THAT Primrose Path.

Really nice work.

[ravells]

Thanks Hai, this was exactly the sort of advice I was after. The look and feel of the map is based on one by Van Loam in 1907, which uses hatchures to show hills. The Van Loam map didn't show vegetation. On old Ordinance Survey maps, the tree symbols are usually tiny and the forest itself is delinated in colour (but this has to be black and white). I'm quite stuck as to how not to obscure the contour lines - putting the contour lines over the trees looks horrible.

I used the tree thing to make the tree symbols but they look a little pixellated when I import them - I have to say I wasn't entirely happy with them either so your spotting it has made me want to fix the problem. Autotracing them into vector smooths them though. I'm waiting to hear further comments from the bloke I'm doing the commission for and will post the next WIP when I've got his feedback.

@ Treg: Thanks, sadly I don't think that Yog Shogoth County is going to make it into the final version!

[Hai-Etlik]

Thanks Hai, this was exactly the sort of advice I was after. The look and feel of the map is based on one by Van Loam in 1907, which uses hatchures to show hills. The Van Loam map didn't show vegetation. On old Ordinance Survey maps, the tree symbols are usually tiny and the forest itself is delinated in colour (but this has to be black and white). I'm quite stuck as to how not to obscure the contour lines - putting the contour lines over the trees looks horrible.

The best I can suggest is to drop the symbolization using discrete trees and just use a patterned/shaded area, maybe with a smaller number of tree symbols spread over it so that they don't intersect the contours.

rect7727.png

[ravells]

Yeah, that's pretty much what OS does although the symbols are more abstract....I could try dots instead of the gray to keep it pure black and white. ... thanks for the ideas..I'll have a play.

[ravells]

Next WIP, this is the best I could come up with to stop the occlusion of the contour lines. Do you think it's an improvement or are the original trees better? I'm a bit conflicted.

[ravells]

And here it is with some aging added just to check it would look OK. I think I prefer Hai's idea of the more scattered trees (they need some cleaning up), since it allows for more information to be put in like trails and the like.

[tilt]

looking good ravs - and I like the way the trees turned out

[ravells]

Cheers, tilt!