Wednesday, September 14, 2016

The White Forest of Iorden: a map commission

This post is Part 3 of a series to augment the Fictional Cartography by D.N.Frost available for free download. Start with Part 1 here.

This and other map commissions are gathered in my Portfolio Directory for you to explore.

Find more guest-inspired content in my Guest Directory.



With the project in full swing after Part 1 of this series, I encouraged Zach and Christian to be as picky and opinionated as possible. That's the best way to get a great map that really represents the spirit of an invented world.

After we finalized the topography, I perused the TOAFN font set they'd sent me and selected a legible italic font with some cool distress around the letters. The next challenge loomed. It was time to tackle the White Forest.


Check out this Fictional Cartography by D.N.Frost for more maps!


Zach and Christian envisioned huge trees for their home of the elves, with bright silvery trunks that give the forest its name.

To represent the unique strangeness of this forest, and I played with my silver embossing technique from the cover art for Broken.

I came up with some cool tree trunks in silver, but they looked weird and out of place on the map. I enlarged the forest symbols to give the trunks more room, but it still looked off.

My final solution was to apply silver embossing to the label itself. This made the silver more prevalent and obvious, helping make the tree trunks stand out as unique and beautiful, rather than awkward and unrelated to anything else on the map. Then I sent this render to the TOAFN team for feedback on the silver technique.


That's it for this post! Up Next: Adding the towns and rivers...

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Download Fictional Cartography by D.N.Frost here, or start your adventure below.






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1 comment:

  1. Hello there! My name is D.N.Frost, and I'm a fantasy author, cartographer, and world-builder. My love for storytelling drives me to build the Known World, map its lands, and tell its tales. Let me send you my free ebook at DNFrost.com!

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