Cartographer Aspiring to Create Beautiful Cartography

[TJLuke]

Hello everyone,

I have been doing GIS cartography for a while now and somehow have missed this awesome website the whole time. I have been working primarily in the realm of vector maps but unfortunately am about as artistic as a bag of doorknobs. I have never really had the opportunity to make a really "pretty" map on my own without using image overlays with vectorized data. Hoping to see some other works and be inspired to actually pick up a digital workspace to try my hand at it. Looking forward to getting some other opinions as well from cartography minded persons outside of the GIS world.

- TJLuke

[snodsy]

Hey TJLuke;

I joined about a year ago to brush up on my photoshop skills, I too was doing mainly vector maps for various hospitals, parks, etc, but wanted to learn how to do these types of maps, there are some great tutorial here on the site that will help you learn some great techniques. Go to FORUM and scroll down to MAPPING RESOURCES, you'll find some Tutorials there that are incredible helpful.

Also please share with us some of your knowledge on GIS, I know some here are using QGIS, and GIS has been a recent conversation. I've played with it to make a few maps myself. welcome and look forward to seeing what you do.

[Chick]

Hello TJLuke!

Welcome to the Guild!

There is a great tutorial in the sticky section of Tutorials, called Quickstart Guide to Fantasy Mapping: http://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=4276

From there, go to Hand Drawn Mapping for the Artistically Challenged: http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...ad.php?t=10655

Once you have completed those two tutorials, you'll be well on your way!!

[TJLuke]

Sorry for the long response, I have been in the process of changing jobs.

My experience has primarily been with ArcGIS and some limited 3D specific applications like Terra Explorer. I began mapping in the Army and found that the products that were usually requested were very simple so I took steps to make them visually appealing as well. I did some base-level analysis and tracking and found that the maps I "improved" were requested more than the base maps that had been available before. It was really interesting to see just how much a little color, or changing a palette created more demand. I have always been an avid gamer and the ability of some writers to create a world that goes against everything we can actually physically see has stuck with me. My days playing D&D always left me creating maps (overland, dungeon, planar, etc) and created an interest to write myself to try to put the places I imagined out in a way that others could also enjoy them.