Of Turnovers and Cities

Snapshot of a city map

It’s good to hand over final pieces. This one went out the door today – a city map for a client. The combination of detailed line art featured locations and more anonymous shadowed buildings seems to work well.

The featured locations were all drawn at many times their final size. You lose the precise detail when the locations are shrunk down, but the combination of the details provide a sense of the structure.

4 thoughts on “Of Turnovers and Cities”

  1. It is a very fine map and I am also a big fan of the Annual. It looks like you may have answered a question I was about to email.

    “The featured locations were all drawn at many times their final size. You lose the precise detail when the locations are shrunk down, but the combination of the details provide a sense of the structure.”

    So when you are creating map symbols is this what you are talking about? I am a fairly new GIMP user and was wondering. Is it better to create the symbol in a larger resolution and then reduce it or work in the resolution I want it in? Also, is there a way to figure out how big I should go to reduce down to say…222X276 as a final size?

    I will also be using your map style for this January Map competition for Profantasy. Thanks for the resources.

    Cheers,
    Brian

    1. Start and finish size totally depend on what you’re after. For this, I worked on the building outlines at 3x the final resolution. That meant I could doodle away happily on the details without worrying about being small and cramped.

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