Hello everyone, and welcome back to the Random Fantasy Maps series, where I will be bringing you some fantasy map action from different eras for you to enjoy reading about! The subject of this post is a a medieval-style, Dungeons and Dragons inspired world called the Kingdom of Ventura and Lorentia.
But before we can start drawing the map, firstly, we need to do some digging and go into details about what this fantasy world is all about, huh?
What is the Kingdom of Ventura and Lorentia?
The Kingdom of Ventura and Lorentia is set in 9th century AD, and is named after the two main islands that make up the archipelago - the islands of Ventura and Lorentia. The Kingdom is a monarchy that has been ruled by King Albert II (born 785 AD) since the year 851 AD.
Transportation around the Kingdom typically takes place in one of three ways - horse-drawn carriages used by the islands' more wealthy inhabitants, small, rickety boats to get between the main islands, as well as by walking long distances between the settlements.
The main island of Ventura is primarily inhabited by the Anglo-Saxons, with the main settlement being Venturinium (population 7,500) in the centre of the island, along the Coronado River. Venturinium is a major trading centre for the Kingdom in general, particularly in the sale of luxury goods, such as wines, furs and jewels, with products coming in from all parts of the island, along with some imports from Lorentia and Cerania. Out west, along the isolated Rupert Peninsula is Ventura's main fishing town of Rupert (population 300), where different types of migratory fish (such as cod and herring) are caught every year and served as a staple meal to Ventura's wealthier inhabitants.
In the centre of the island, the settlement of Port Arras (population 1,000) serves as the main entry point for passengers and cargo to the island, while further north, the Drake mountain range contains some enormous mountaintops and very steep valleys, as well as the settlements of Drake (population 12) and Ophelia (population 190) that are relatively isolated from the rest of the island, creating serious challenges in terms of getting in supplies. On the other hand, the terrain in the south is mostly easy going and flat in nature, with the settlements of Phylicia and Volkertium being reachable from Port Arras in a short amount of time.
Likewise, the flat terrain in the south of the island also present the ideal conditions for agricultural farming, primarily in the production of wheat and barley, as well as some fruit and vegetable cultivation, made possible due to the government investing large amounts of money on building irrigation systems along the Phylicia river. As a result, the residents of the southern settlements of Ventura thrive on a more agrarian lifestyle in comparison to those inhabitants that live further north.
The other main island of Lorentia is more culturally diverse, with the economy being more dependent on fishing activity and cargo importation in the settlements of Port Lorentia and Durian, along with some agricultural production in the north of the island, as well as the trading of antiquities in the island's main town of Lorentia Woods (population 2,500). On the other hand, the island's nomad tribes live around the settlement of Desolateland in the island's southern deserts, existing on a more self-sufficent lifestyle by hunting some of the native wildlife.
Cerania's economy is predominantly nature-based; the main work activities on the island include maintenance of the surrounding woods on the island, as well as on its sister island of East Cerania, in addition to fishing as well as exports of wood products to Ventura - most wood is exported from Cerania due to strict conservation laws that are designed to limit the exploitation of wood materials that originate from the Central Venturian and Lorentian Forests.
The Kingdom is archipelagic in nature, as ships passing through typically navigate the Central Passage before coming back out into the open ocean through the Rotnar Passage or the Cerania Navigation as opposed to circumnavigating the islands. The Central Passage defines the narrowest point between the two main islands of Ventura and Lorentia, where mighty sea currents make it hazardous for sailors to navigate the channel from east to west, but can also be a big time advantage for ships heading in a north to south direction.
The waterways also contain some strategically important islands, with the southern Dewan sub-archipelago, and the northern Arras sub-archipelagos providing shelter from the strong winds that prevail in the main Central Passage navigation, allowing for safer navigation by boats into Port Arras, Phylicia and Durian respectively.
Island design process
The process of hand-drawing the island was split into two different days - on the first day, I started off the project by drawing the landmasses, followed by mountains and then forests (briefly dipping into colouring them in, along with adding a blue colour to the surounding oceans):
On the second day, I finished off the hand-drawing design by drawing the river lines, as well as colouring in the landmasses (which includes mountains, as well as the desert landscape in the south of Lorentia). Afterwards, I then started labelling the islands and marked the settlements to produce this end result:
Once the hand-drawing has been completed, it's time to get on that computer and start drawing! For this fantasy world, I decided to experiment with something a little bit different to what I used to build the map of Somerville town - as I used a fantasy worldbuilding website called Inkarnate to create the digital drawing of the map.
The first step was to choose a fantasy mapping style from which we are going to be working on our maps, as shown here:
Screenshot of the Inkarnate style selection screen
The second step was to choose the orientation of the map drawing. Since I drew the map in landscape format, I decided to stick with high quality, 40 x 30 tiles for this map, as shown here:
Once the map has been set-up, it was time to get to work - the first objective was to use the masking tool to draw the core landmasses, before moving onto the offshore islands. In terms of drawing the main islands, I decided to start off with a mask brush size of 10.
Initially, using the masking tool took quite a bit of experimenting before I could start drawing the map. But once I have gained enough practice, things started getting easier to play with. However, at one point, as I was drawing the south of Ventura, I ended up running out of space and had to spend a bit of time refining the coastline so that it is as close to scale as possible with the hand-drawn version of the map.
The diagram below illustrates what the map looks like after drawing the first iteration of Ventura. Note the little bulge of land on the east coast - that was created from having to touch up the coastline around that area to make it slightly less wonky.
After that, I would move on to drawing the other island of Lorentia, using the same mask brush size:
Once that's done, I would then draw the chain of islands around the island's Central Passage. To make things a bit easier for myself, I used a brush size of 2 as opposed to 10 to draw the outline on some of the smaller islands, as shown here:
After filling in all the landmasses and islands with stock land textures, this is what I got from the first iteration:
Once the initial map drawing is complete, I would begin the second map drawing iteration, where I spend some time touching up the coastlines to make them more realistic.
The first area that I wanted to work on was Sanctum Island, as I drew the outline of the island quite poorly the first time round, leaving circular blobs around much of the island as seen below:
So I decided to do a bit more work to make the coastline look a lot less wonky, and then I would increase the brush size to 10 to subtract about one-third of the island's landmass to make it look like the hand drawn version of the island:
After that, I shrunk Roscoff Island to widen the Central Passage navigation, and roughened some of its coasts a tiny bit:
Roscoff Island before and after
I also decided to re-draw the coastline around the northern Rupert Peninsula, as the northernmost parts of the peninsula were encroaching too closely on the island of West Arras, giving this final output:
One of the Rotnar Islands was also drawn a little bit oversize, so I decided to shrink it down by redrawing the island to produce this:
Shortly after I took this screenshot, I did a little bit more roughening to the northern coast to generate a more realistic set of coastlines, which you will see in the following screenshot.
And this is what the map looks like after the second map drawing iteration:
Once I have completed the landmass drawings, the next step is to paint the islands as well as the surrounding ocean, firstly starting off with the desert landscape that makes up the southern part of Lorentia, as well as the entirety of Dolores Island. For this, I have decided to use the "Desert 3" texture from Inkarnate's catalog, as shown here:
Going back to the map editor, I then applied the aforementioned texture to the map using the paint tool, using a brush size of 40 and 100% opacity, which sorts out that matter fairly quickly. And since the painting tool won't override your landmasses, there is no need to panic!
The second step of the land transformation process was to work on smoothing out the transition from the northern desert areas to the rest of the island in order to make the terrain look more realistic. To do this, I decided to use a brush size of 15, as well as 20 to 30% opacity, producing this result:
Once I have completed the process of touching up the edges of the Lorentia desert, I decided to go back to the background layer and play around with the background on the surrounding oceans. This is to reflect the fact that the Central Passage is more shallow in depth in comparison to the open oceans that surround the Kingdom.
To start off the process, I decided to change the ocean background to a darker blue colour, as seen here:
Then, I decided to apply 50% opacity on the dark blue colour using the paintbrush tool to give that nice transition from shallower into deeper water, producing this end result:
Once the ocean depths have been defined, the time has come to move on to the most fun part of the map project - adding the mountains! As I have illustrated granite mountains in my hand-drawing of the Kingdom, I decided to go with granite (grey) mountain sprites, as shown in this screenshot of the Inkarnate mountain catalog:
Being the easiest of the mountain ranges to draw on Ventura, I decided to start off with the Flatt Range, which is located towards the south-eastern end of the island. Here, I decided to start off with sprite number 6 and a size of 80 to draw this range, since I felt that this particular size and mountain design would match up with how I drew the mountains on the hand-drawn version of the map.
Flatt Range in relation to the south of Ventura
Afterwards, I then decided to move on to the smallest mountain range on Ventura - the Rupert Peninsula mountains. Again, to make sure that the mountains fit in the same way as the hand-drawn version of the map, I decided to use a smaller sprite size of 50, as shown here:
But the biggest challenge on Ventura (which actually was not challenging at all!) was the Drake Mountain range, with its large size, as well as the range containing some snow-capped mountains which necessitates the use of a different mountain sprite.
However, the default colour of the snow-capped mountain sprite was orange - and so before I could use the sprite, I had to set the level of saturation on the mountain sprite to 0 - that way, the snow-capped mountains can blend in with the granite geology of the smaller mountains, as illustrated here:
Afterwards, I then decided to saturate the northern part of map with mountains in the usual way, although this time scaling down the mountain sprite size to 60, as illustrated here.
And with that, that's all the mountain ranges of Ventura completed!
Just so that there isn't a sudden transition into the mountainous landscapes from the flat terrain that makes up the remainder of Ventura, I also added some hill sprites for good measure:
The Lesser Drake Mountains are populated with hills...
And after that, it was time to move on to drawing the mountains that make up the northeastern part of Lorentia. Again, the task was not too challenging as demonstrated in the final output here:
Illustration of the Lorentia mountain range
Eventually, after putting in some mountains on the smaller islands, this is how the map looks like after completing the mountain project:
Map of the Kingdom after drawing the mountains
Moving on from the "fun" of the mountain drawings, the next step was to draw the rivers leading into the mountainous terrain. For this, I decided to use the masking tool to draw the river contours by "subtracting" some land from the island. The stroke size varies depending on how far I am drawing up the river, and whether I am drawing a tributary of that river - typically, the stroke size ranges from 2 to 4, as seen in this example here:
For the mouths of the Coronado and Phylicia rivers, I decided to widen the river navigation so that they appear as estuaries, such as the example seen here with the mouth of the Coronado river:
And after some more playing around, this is how the map looks like after drawing up the rivers:
Before we know it, the time has come to move on to the final part of drawing the map digitally - which is to add in some forests. It won't be long before our map is done and we can start polishing things up, huh?
Now I've decided to change things up a little bit from the hand-drawn map by adding some vegetation and trees to some areas of the map that I haven't illustrated originally as containing forests (such as areas to the south of Ventura) - that way, the map does not look too plain and unattractive to look at.
And after adding in some settlement icons, map labels and paths between the settlements, as well as some more touching up to make it look neat and presentable, here is the final map of the Kingdom of Lorentia and Ventura:
Conclusions on the project
As I have been using a new editing program to make this map, I would like to break down this section of the post into two different reviews - firstly talking about the Inkarnate program and its features, and secondly, talking about the project itself and where I believe I could have done things differently if I had to do this again.
Generally, I found the Inkarnate fantasy map builder to be a really good tool for a beginner who wants to build a Dungeons and Dragons campaign map, or a general middle-earth map for their portfolio collections. Firstly, Inkarnate is the Wix of fantasy map making, as it is really easy to learn how to draw landmasses and then touch them up, and there are plenty of built-in assets for mountains, villages and biomes, which can save huge amounts of time in terms of the overall workflow in comparison to having to draw the objects yourself (although there is an option to import your own sprites as well).
Furthermore, Inkarnate has a really large community of mappers, and their Reddit forum in particular is highly active - I have seen many posts there from first-time mappers about their maps that have been responded to with highly constructive feedback, which encourages new mappers to take action to improve their fantasy mapping skills. And the best part about the program from a business perspective is that the costs to purchase a commercial license are very low ($25 per year) - making it a very attractive tool for a freelancer who is looking to use it to undertake commission-based fantasy map work.
On the other hand, the main downside of fantasy map maker programs like Inkarnate is that there is a lack of resources that would allow people to make modern-style fantasy - therefore necessitating one to use one of the more advanced editing programs such as Inkscape, GIMP and Photoshop to make such maps.
But would I use Inkarnate again to make middle-earth maps? Absolutely.
Going onto the project itself, I must say that I had loads of fun putting together my first ever middle-earth style fantasy map - whether it was drawing the map by hand (which actually made me feel really relaxed at times) and having to do it again on the computer (trust me, I had a really great time trying to figure this out!), adding different geographical features, or even adding the map labels at the end of the project, I really enjoyed almost every minute of it.
On the other hand, the one part of the project that I enjoyed the least was having to playing around with the icons that depict the Kingdom's ports, particularly around Port Lorentia and Coronado Inlet - when I tried to rotate the icons in those settlements so that they face the river mouths, I ended up getting a result where the crane supports were uplifted off the ground, meaning that I had to place the crane sprites on the coasts instead - no bueno. I also think that I could have done some smoothing out on the terrain around South Dewan so that there isn't that abrupt transition from the desert to the greenery further east.
In terms of the rivers, I believe that my best work in that regard was the Phylicia river in the south of Ventura, where I managed to make all the tributaries flow really nicely into the different mountains of the Flatt Range. On the other hand, I believe that I could have changed the look of the Lorentia River basin and instead added a canal linking the Lorentia River with the bay around the northeast of Lorentia (would have saved tons of time for ships) - as one of the tributaries of the Lorentia river flows a little bit too closely to the bay.
And with that, I hope you have enjoyed this fantasy map making adventure, and I shall see you next time with an event post, or a post where I return to the long-paused Youtubia project! Let me know if you have any suggestions on improving this map.
Signing off now,
Jakub
.jpg)
Comments
Post a Comment