Digital Thursday

It is Digital Thursday and through some kind of hecurlean effort (much to Wifey's chagrin) I was able to push this latest Digital Thursday piece out the door before the deadline of today. This Digital Thursday episode is brought to you by the Cartographers' Guild. "What is the Cartographers' Guild?" you ask. well it is a forum of cartographers who like making fantasy and role playing game maps. Some are professionals in the RPG industry, but most are enthusiasts who just enjoy RPG's, sci-fi and fantasy maps.

This piece is from the September Mapping Challenge, which was quite a bit more open ended than most of the challenges I have seen. The challenge this month was to take a quickly sketched map and do it up in a style of our own choosing. The sketched map was this one:
Overall this sketched map is pretty quick and dirty. The green is forest, the yellow-ish brown is swampland, and the pink are places that people live. This month there were 28 entries. It was, in a weird way, good that I waited so long to complete mine. By there being 28 entries the contestant cartographers really need to do something special to distinguish themselves from the competition. Seeing what genres were already done, I really needed to come up with an angle that was different.

My idea was that an advanced spacefaring people were surveying a more primitive society's planet. Here I give you "Planetary Survey."
All total this was about 12 hours in the making (not including the stops and starts down dead end styles). It was done in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator CS3. I don't think I will win, but I should at least get some votes.

To recap:
I haven't done a mapping challenge in a looong time
It was an interesting exercise
Speaking of exercise I needs to do that again soon
Having a Papa day tomorrow
So I will not be joining all of you stuck in the office
I will be in my own private Hell
A hell of taking care of 2 kids at the same time
I don't know how people do it day in and day out
Listening to 4 Sticks by the Rollins Band off of the Led Zepplin tribute album Encomium
Have a great weekend everyone