Hello my beloved guild!

Today I'm going to share with you the biggest topographical endeavour I've had to work with and I'm enjoying every piece of it (thank God I got a new computer earlier this year), so I thought I'd share some of my enthusiasm. It's a commission and I'm posting the progress with permission.

The workflow is inspired by Artifexian's series on atlas mapping which I warmly recommend to anyone interested in the topic.

GPlates

The first step was making a sketch in GPlates so that I wouldn't have to bother with the projection while drawing.



Illustrator: Coastlines

Second step: reproducing the coastlines in Illustrator.

j preview 2.png

We later improved the alignment and worked on the shapes. (You can open the files in different tabs in your browser to be able to compare each version.)

j preview 3-01.png
j preview 4-01.png
j preview 5-01.png
j preview 6-01.png
j preview 7-01.png

Illustrator: Topography

Topography. <3 This is how it first looked.

j preview snippet 1.PNG
j preview snippet 3.PNG

Then after some adjustments.

j preview 8 wo rivers.PNG
j preview 8 massif zoom.png

I also made a very professionally-looking sketch for the rivers (in red are the areas I haven't worked with yet). I'm really looking forward to designing the river networks, but a lot more topography will happen before I get to that point!

j preview 8.png

There is a 400m interval between each layer, which means the massifs reach up to 6,000(+399)m.

I'm going to regularly update you guys on this from now on. Ideas and feedback welcome!