Overland with Josh Mannon!

I was lucky enough to be asked to work with +Josh Mannon from At the Table Games again, and without fail, he pushed me again. :)

If you read this blog you know that I have been forcing myself to stop using Fireworks, an art program that I have used for about fifteen years, and force myself to learn GIMP. This causes many of my old tricks and secrets to be lost and I am having to recreate many things that I have had before that I could pull from. So jumping right into a large project was not something I had been planning. Each of his maps is a little of a challenge for me (one way, way more so than the others) but having to spice them up on GIMP is a big challenge and a definite change for me.

For this project I am working maps for the successful Kickstarter Josh started last fall for Skies over Danbury. Josh challenged me with an overland or small regional map, not my forte I feel, but I wanted to continue using the hand drawn look I prefer so I played around and drew up this preliminary map while sitting at the table visiting with my in-laws over the Christmas holiday. I was pretty happy with it (minus those damn trees) and Josh approved.

In the end I decided to redraw the map on larger paper so the scan would be cleaner and I could put in a little more detail with the land forms. I also moved a few things around slightly and I think, ended up with a better map. Click the top image to see a larger version of the map.