Like I did on Monday, I wanted to experiment some more remarking a Perilous Shores map in Wonderdraft. After some rerolls, Perilous Shores gave me the following wonderful little hex map:
This time, I learned how to better fit an overlay image to the map and vice versa. For one, since Perilous Shores produces square maps, I just made the canvas square—easy win but quite worthwhile. Because both maps were the same shape, it was much easier now to rescale the overlay image to fit the canvas exactly, making it must easier to faithfully adapt the map compared to last time.
This did make me face a new issue, however: previously, all I did was adjust the size of the hexes in Wonderdraft to fit the overlay image, and then moved on from there. Now, however, since I was trying to exactly lay the overlay image on to the canvas, I couldn’t get the hexes to fit up neatly. The way Perilous Shores and Wonderdraft lay out the hex grids differs and I couldn’t find a setting to offset the grid in Wonderdraft, so I was left with a grid that I couldn’t match. Fortunately, I figured out that I could resize the canvas selectively (i.e. in specific directions), which ended up resolving the problem. What I ended up doing was resizing the hex grid in Wonderdraft until all the hexes were the same size as the Perilous Shores hexes, and then I lined both hex grids together, and just readjusted the canvas until it was the same size as well as the same position as the Perilous Shores overlay original. As a result, I could get a much more faithful recreation than I got on Monday.
Coloring remains something that I want to practice more with (hence this very exercise), and while I’m not fully there, I do feel I’m starting to move in the right direction. This time, the marshlands look far more accurate to me. The teal coloring of last time seemed quite out of place, and just using a darker green coloring portrays the same feeling but looks more natural to my eyes. I can imagine adjust it slightly with a blue to make it more marshy but I’m already pleased with this look.
Another thing that I think worked better was labelling the regions. What I changed was to make them more transparent but slighly larger than other labels. That way, they fade more into the background of the map, almost “sinking into” the terrain. For colors, I picked a similar color to the terrain itself but shifted the font a few shades lighter and the outline a few shades darker. The end result has it fit a little more into the map. It worked quite nicely on the marsh, though I think for the font on the mountains it came out a little off. This time I eyeballed it, so I think that next time I’ll use the dropper tool to have a more stable basis for the color.
Lastly, I chose to not differentiate the label for the village and the town but to introduce the difference in the dangerous location. As you can see, what I did was have settlement labels be white-on-black whereas the dangerous location is black-on-white. What I like about this is that the font is the same, making these places feel equivalent, yet the coloring suggests an inverted relationship. In retrospect, though, I do think next time I want to differentiate the villages and towns from each other to more clearly indicate size differences. That might also immediately help me signify the size of dangerous locations, if I keep that consistently inverted as well.
I’m quite happy with how faithfully my map recreates the Perilous Shores map even down to the very placement of the trees themselves. I feel like it’s an important skill to be able to create an accurate representation of something else. When I can faithfully recreate these types of maps well, I suspect it will also help me create my own maps better.
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