Over lunch today I had a Hangout out the the magnificent Priscilla Spencer, who, when not jet setting, making maps for Jim Butcher, or filming entire movies in a week, has signed up to make maps for Stone Dragon Mountain.
We’ve been emailing back and forth for a bit but decided a Hangout would helpful as we could talk while screen sharing. So much screen sharing…
Doing art direction for a map is hard! Especially a map of terrain that isn’t flat or even has any sort of “levels”. My horrible scribbles that I’ve used so far have really only told me what points are connected to what other points. But there is no sense of their existence on or in the mountain.
To convey the locations I went through:
- My Stone Dragon Mountain Pinterest Board
- The flavor text in the current draft
- My ugly ass doodles of maps
- My narration of what I think they should look like
- Kurt’s beautiful cover.
With aplomb Priscilla took it all in and assured it me would all be fine. Given the work she has done and her ideas as we talked, I’m confident as well. And as a bit of a teaser, here’s the terrible map I’ve been using this far (with location names removed).