Monday, January 31, 2022

Agder Redone

Once again I find myself messing around with colour schemes for my 6-mile hex maps.  Most maps on this wiki have 20-mile hexes, but I also build maps that "zoom in."  Recently on my wiki, I posted such a map of Agder, a county in southern Norway.   I wasn't especially pleased with how it looked on the wiki, so I spent some time making adjustments to the icons and the general appearance.  The result is this:


The above includes Agder and a larger area surrounding it; opening the image in its own window should provide a clear detailed picture, as I saved this in 300 dpi.

I'm still not sure.  The mountain repetition looks a bit processed, but then there's nothing necessarily wrong with that.  I do like the colour scheme for the larger, more important cities; they're in shades of brown.  But overall, I'm posting this to make the point — outside the series I'm writing — often demands a new look at old work.  It's not a straight line.  This is, I think, my fourth version of a 6-mile hex map, and still I'm looking at it and wanting to change the border colour.

At least, it doesn't look heavy-handed.  With maps, I find, muted variations often look better than primary colours.

Anyway, no, there's no key to the above as yet.  White country is pure mountain rock with little vegetation, the bluish-purple is shield country, interspersed with stunted and very thin pine trees, while the various greens indicate semi-arable and arable lands.  Darker colours are more populated and possess more activity (hammers), wealth (coins) and farming (bread).

2 comments:

  1. You made the right choice in colors. In general adults prefer more muted pastel-like colors; bright colors with extreme contrast can be off-putting and hard to look at or concentrate on.

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  2. I tend to save the stronger colors for points of interest and roads. Even then they are more brick red then true red.

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