Ok. We have all the animals I've got time to do this time around - cows, bulls, horses and sheep.

With only a few days left before handover, I can do a couple more things now. I'm tempted to go for ruined versions of a keep, the bridge and maybe a tower if I can get it done.

Hi Everyone :)

If you have been following the recent trend in the Live Mapping sessions of working through the first ever Cartographer's Annual, you might find this thread interesting.

I decided to make a map in each of the styles as Ralf was working through them, so here are the first few. I missed out on the 3rd issue, but I'm working on it and it should be posted soon.

Issue 001 - Mercator. 2 maps - one original style, and one modified

Issue 002 - John Speed City. This is Dorchester, my county town, and one that was mapped by JS for real. This is my version of his map.

Issue 003 - Fantasy Tavern.

Issue 004 - Sarah Wroot. East Runia - a small map I created by scaling the new map by 0.5.

I will keep adding to this comment as we go, so that all the example maps are here in one place.

Thank you for all your appreciation :)

Next up, I have a set of proto-cliff symbols. Now these look rough because they are raw Blender renders. That's why there are strange triangular bits where the Blender's Cycles rendering machine can't be told to ignore the back faces of the models and I had to hack it by telling it to see through only one layer of polygons. It still sees the back of the cliff where it's still visible as the first layer of the model polys from the camera's point of view.

(that's Blender 2.79 btw - an out of date version because I just haven't got the time to learn and convert everything to 2.9, which probably does the job without even blinking, but which completely throws all my lighting in the air - as per usual with any new version of Blender ?)

Anyway... They're super clunky and only one length, but I thought you might like to be able to build crude plateaus to go with your mesas - once I've painted out the odd bits that is.

A bit of river stuff this time. After all - what would a walk through the forest be without the streams and the stepping stones?

And things that loom under the trees...

Slowly getting on with the ruins...

Here is a finished example map for part 2, showing some of the new symbols and fills.

There's more. I just didn't want to overcrowd the map with stuff.

Thank you, Raiko

I did some better waves yesterday, and then had to change the ripples quite a lot to make things sit right with the rest of the style.

Hope you still like it.

Working on the trees today with my new Affinity brushes. These new brushes I've got are also how I managed to draw the fire. No promises yet, but I am very much hoping to generate some kind of water flow symbol with them as well.

Hi Everyone :)

Following on from Ralf's recent Live Mapping session covering the use of the Mercator style from the first ever Cartographer's Annual, I decided to take a couple of days break to make my own Mercator map.

I hope you like it :)

I decided to work a bit on the coastline effects. I wanted to do a bevel, but at the same time leave myself (and eventually others) free to make coastlines as jagged as I want without the risk of those corner artefacts you sometimes get if you get a bit too ambitious with the Bevel. So instead of using the Bevel effect I put the water on top of the land like it would be in a city map, and added a pale glow and a dark directional shadow.

What do you think?