Here's a version with a darker red:

And here's a version where I tried lighter text on a darker background. (The white ones at the end are the only ones that really work.) For this one, I moved the text to a different sheet so I could turn off the white glow that just made it look bolded in a way that made it harder to read.

Made some good progress, including labeling some of the primary businesses and points of interest. I also widened it a bit to make room for a legend. The text was a little hard to read so I added a semi-transparent back. Let me know if it's still too hard to read, and what you'd recommend to help that (make the back less transparent? darker or lighter shade?)

Ever since the Parchment Cities annual came out in February, I've been wanting to create a map of old San Francisco, California -- the city where I live and was born, and where generations of my ancestors were from.

I wanted to find a reference map for 1895, because by that point, six of my eight grandparents were living here by then. (Two moved here no later than the late 1860s, one moved here in 1884, two others moved from different parts of France in the early 1890s, meeting and marrying in San Francisco.) Unfortunately, the images I found were poor-quality JPGs that would have been a challenge to draw the coastline correctly. (The coastline changed significantly after the famous earthquake in 1906 that burned a huge swath of the City. In rebuilding the City, a lot of the rubble was tossed into the bay, changing the coastline and becoming landfill that newer buildings were built on top of.

Once I made peace with not finding a good 19th century source map, it become much easier to hunt down good quality SVG images on Wikimedia Commons that I could convert into a DXF file with CloudConvert. That made doing the coastline much easier.

I will still have to do the streets and blocks using JPG reference images, as my source map included elevation changes rather than streets. To make it a little easier, I decided to focus on the northeast corner of the city, the downtown Financial District. I thought about doing my own neighborhood but it's in the middle of the City, three miles to the east of the ocean, and three miles southwest from the bay, so I wouldn't have gotten any of the lovely coastline.

Anyway, here's what I have so far. The streets will take a lot more time.

I was going to render a part of my Fractal Terrains campaign world in the new Sarah Wroot Revisited style, just to play around with the new style, but I decided to wait until Ralf has a chance to do a tutorial first. In the meantime, I went back to the January 2024 annual that I never really played with, Fantasy Realms Reimagined, to try it with that.

I was going to render the Republic of Lumadair area of my map that I have done before in the Parchment Worlds, Jerion Shading, and Mike Shley styles, but I decided that it was too massively oversized for this style. Those maps are 6,109 by 2,445 miles! (I think we calculated that Lumadair is slightly smaller than Australia, and the map includes part of the mainland continent of Lenoch, which I wanted to include to be able to do more mountains and rivers.)

So I picked a prominent river in the main kingdom I am developing, the Achalus River, and decided that it would run through a duchy named after the river. This is a much smaller map than Lumadair, but it is still 1,343 by 537 miles.

Anyway, here is the Fractal Terrains output in both the Jerion and Schley styles, just for frame of reference:

And here is what I did in Fantasy Realms Reimagined:

I copied over a mid-level elevation contour from the Jerion export to serve as a temporary drawing guide for the hills, and then another higher elevation as a temporary guide for the mountains. This style doesn't actually have a hills or mountains background the way the Schley style does (I mean, it does, but just for the individual hill or mountain itself: it renders onto a layer for the hill or mountain itself, with the ridge lines going on another layer). But I decided it was helpful as more than just a drawing guide, so I changed the hill background to brown and the mountain one to gray, put them on separate sheets, and added Edge Fade and Blur effects.

The coast looks blurry, but that's just because the map is so large. Here's how it looks zoomed in (it has a bevel effect on the LAND sheet instead of having a separate outline on a Coast sheet):

Even though I labeled this post as a Work in Progress, I probably won't do much more on this particular map. We'll see how much more I do when I have a chance to revisit it with the Sarah Wroot Revisited style. I may end up adding all the extra stuff when I flesh out the entire kingdom, which I suspect I will do in the Mike Schley style. This was just for fun and practice -- and it gave me a chance to use a style from this year's annual that I haven't really worked with before (other than using the hills in a back-burnered rendering of the Wizard of Oz map that I'm working on).

Here's a bit more. More to come, especially fleshing out the empty spots within the village walls. Plus labeling, of course.