My personal Garthok has been the map I've been creating for Spoutwood Farm. I took on the task of producing a map for use both as a part of the Fairie Festival program and for use as on-site signage. My other hope was to produce a definitive base map that can be used for the other events the farm hosts such as the Mother Earth Harvest Festival.
*don't forget to click the images for larger versions!
I really had no idea how big a job it was going to be nor how big I was going to make it for myself. To be honest, if I were starting over again, it would take considerably less time. Let's call it a learning experience.
I thought I'd use this post to walk you through my process so you can see what a convoluted, but well intended path I took to produce the final image.
The farm has had a map made for nearly every festival they've had and some were well illustrated but hard to read, some were clear to read but uninspired, some were just awful. My goal was to make a map that was accurate, readable and well illustrated. Beyond that I wanted it to be easy for users to find landmarks and orient themselves. For inspiration, I was thinking of the illustrated maps used by amusement parks such as Disney World with clearly identifiable renderings of the layout and the buildings on site.
With those goals in mind, I formulated a plan of attack. Since accuracy of the layout was important to me I thought a good place to start was Google maps. I grabbed a decent shot of the farm. Having a decent view of the layout gave a good place to start for positioning buildings and other landmarks, but I wanted a better sense of the literal lay of the land, so I turned to Google Earth which allowed me to tilt the camera and find a good angle for representing the farm from in the map. Now I could see the lay of the land, but I wanted to try to model that more accurately in a way I could use -this is one way I went astray in the process.
Unfortunately, my game developer instincts took over and I thought to myself that if I made a good 3D model of the farm, I could both view and render an optimal POV for the final illustrated map. So I fell back on a plan of downloading DEM data, pull that into Lightwave to generate a terrain model and then by overlaying the imagery from Google Maps, I could build and place the farm buildings and trees with a high degree of accuracy. At this point I was thinking that in addition to creating a helpful aid for drawing the final map, I could also simultaneously generate a virtual Spoutwood that might have other uses down the road. This path would turn out to be more trouble than it was worth, but did lead to a more useful solution.
I was able to get the DEM loaded as a model, but being REALLY rusty with Lightwave and not having a copy of 3D Studio Max at home, I had a really hard time getting the terrain image properly aligned to the terrain geometry. After an afternoon of flailing about, I gave up this route and looked for a better solution.
Although I had never used it before (due to having more powerful tools at my disposal), I looked into Google's Sketchup software. Sketchup is a free 3D modeling tool that was built primarily to enable users to build 3D models of buildings to integrate into Google Earth. It's a bit tedious to use if you're used to better tools, but it is actually fairly intuitive and does the things you need to do to make buildings pretty well. It also, I discovered, integrates with Google Earth so that you can import terrain directly from GE. This was the missing link! I was able to load up the farm in Google Earth, import the terrain height data and the satellite imagery in one fell swoop and build my rough models of the farm buildings all in one application. As a side note, Sketchup is really a fun little app and if you want to make houses and the like it's really quite good. I used it to prototype some buildings for my upcoming game Civ Revolution. Here you can see the result of my efforts in Sketchup.
My next step was to start illustrating the map. My big problem was that I was prepping the map for two sizes: 36"x24" and 14"x10". The larger map was a concern mainly because of sheer size -working on a file of that size was going to be slow in terms of what the computer was going to be able to gracefully handle. I vetoed the idea of hand drawing the map as well mainly because I was going to want to work to the size of the larger image. Working at a large size and then having to scan a big drawing was going to be really unwieldy. My solution was to build up a template map in Illustrator which created resolution independent vector files as opposed to bit mapped images. The great thing about Illustrator is it doesn't matter what size you are working at, it can scale as needed. So I set out to essentially trace my rough Sketchup model in Illustrator while simultaneously starting to illustrate the buildings and grounds. As I proceeded, I wanted to try to incorporate some of the simpler graphical approach I had used on the basic map I had made last fall for the Mother Earth Harvest Fair:
I realized early in the process, that some accuracy would have to be sacrificed for clarity. There are some areas that contain so much information that if shown accurately in terms of area, would cause a lot of trouble so I simplified the farm's essentially "L" shaped boundaries into a simplified box shape and eliminated the jog in the tree line on Frodo's Hill. there are some who might look askance at those decisions, but sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do. Before actually getting down to work in Illustrator I went though a few fast rough sketches to figure out how I was going to approach it and explore style in a very loose sense.
My greatest problem with working in Illustrator is that I get seduced by it's innately graphic results. I've written about my issues with working in Illustrator in a previous post, it's a constant conflict in my artistic life. What was happening was I really liked where it was going, but I was conflicted by the idea that the simple silhouettes and modern color styling was running contrary to the spirit of the place and the event.
-a failed attempt to solve my problems with Photoshop filters only :P
So now although I really liked where I was going with the map, a few things began to make think about making some big changes. The first was the style issue, the next was feedback from a few people. One person suggested that if I made Frodo's hill look like a mountain, that it might discourage some people from heading up there. That might be debatable, but it did make me think about the idea that I was going to need a lot more room for adding icons and labeling locations than I had. This was a problem I figured out a bit later than I had hoped. One of the biggest lessons I learned was that I should have worked out the placement of text way before I started illustrating the map. the text largely drives the composition, not the other way around. So my next push was two-pronged: get the content settled with the various stakeholders and think about softening the look graphically speaking. To those ends, I did two things: I created a really stripped down version of the map that would let me move buildings and text around easily and reduce all design considerations to just a few elements; and I started reworking the visual style of the map. I passed this simplified map around for additions and corrections:
While I'm discussing collaberation, I found Skrbl to be a really great way to work with other people on the markup side of things. Skribl allows multiple users to work simultaneously on a virtual whiteboard. I just loaded the map into a session and we had at it.
To solve the style issue, I painted over the buildings in Photoshop to give them texture and to break up the super clean lines that I created in Illustrator (I could have done a better job in Illustrator in the first place, but I wasn't thinking). I also reworked the look of the terrain in a looser, more painterly style as opposed to the graphic, hard edged work I had done at first. I also modified the style of the terrain from a more stylized rolling hill composition to a simpler, flatter look.
There were a few intermediate experiments with style as well, but ultimately I needed to make bigger changes to get the project in line with it's goals. I kind of like all of them, it was a hard choice to abandon some of the directions I went in. I had to fight my natural stylistic tendencies quite a bit. I still really like that rolling hill look, but alas, it had to go.
OK, so the map was finally coming together so I needed to create one more really big obstacle for myself. My plan all along was to fill the big blank area in the lower right with the Spoutwood logo (discussed ad infinitum in earlier posts). Well guess what? Once I loaded it into the newer style map, it just didn't' feel right, it wasn't a good stylistic match. So, what the heck, why not redesign the logo one more time? See my problem is I tend to be idealistic no matter the situation. Not optimistic mind you, -idealistic. So once I get an idea in my head in terms of how something I'm involved in should be, I will exhaust myself trying to get it to that point.
OK, so logo round, 3? 4?
I kept the basic logotype, but instead of relying on those PS brushes I prattled on about, I thought it best to just draw the thing. I created a framing element that contained imagery that I associate with the farm: the tools of gardening and farming, produce, flowers, trees, vines, the seasons, wildlife, faeries and of course a Greenman to anchor it.
-the sketch I did at lunch one day
-the cleaned up drawing
-the final painted version with the logotype added and the banner added for the map label
Once I combined all the elements in the final composition, I did a final style pass , creating paper texture and adding some faux water color splashes and artifacts in Photoshop, as well as blurring out the edges of the image to create a softer edge effect for the final.
-an example showing the texture and water color effects I used
I can't wait to see it finally in print and on the billboards during the Fairie Festival.
Needless to say this was a huge undertaking. Despite the fact that I can see all the warts, and mourn the exclusion of some of the directions the map could have gone, I am really pretty happy with what I got out of it. I still see it as a work in progress. I had a deadline of April 1, so I can't work on it anymore, but it will get pulled out again in the fall for the Mother Earth Harvest Fair and maybe I'll get a chance to polish some of the parts that I'm less than satisfied with. Hope you found this of interest! Feel free to drop me a line if you have any questions about any of the techniques or software I mentioned in here.
