hi! came looking for advive

[dombekia]

hello, new to the site and was hoping to get some advice. im an artist who likes drawing maps by hand. i recently started mapping towns i've lived in and am finding it very difficult. its easy enough to find maps to copy/trace ( though i always wind up making fixes) but now i've gotten to the lettering part an its a friggin nightmare! so... im thinking about using a .... computer... Arrrggrgr. im not good with them. however im wondering if there's a way to get my drawings in and letter them with a program. or even do the whole project in one. any thoughts?
thanks
Brendon
here's one of my old maps to give you a taste
DSCF1445.JPG

[NeonKnight]

Welcome to the Guild!

Your map looks good, I am assuming that is a scanned image and not a computer generated image? If you are looking for a program, my first suggestion would be to try GIMP, it is free and a lot of the mappers here use the program to good effect.

[dombekia]

gimp huh? i'll look into it. yes thats a scanned copy. i sell them on etsy with some other art. everything by hand, the drawing , the antiquing of the paper. all very time consuming. looking for a way to cut some corners without losing the handmade element. part of why i checked out this website is to look into how old cartographers made maps. most of the stuff here seems computer oriented, but i just signed up and haven't dove into the website too far yet. i still have faith. thanks for your reply
B

[Steel General]

Welcome Aboard!

[tilt]

welcome to the site. Yes most on here uses computers for their mapping, no matter if the place previous made elements (or stuff made by others) or hand draw it all themselves. A few makes handdrawn maps the "old fashioned way" ie. with pencil/ink/etc, but please bear in mind, that you can also handdraw with a tablet connected to your computer.
For lettering you can do Gimp (pixel based) or another free program is Inkscape (vector program).