EDIT August 8, 2009: I did print the map, but managed to squeeze another update in, before I did. Here's an update with the addition of cities, roads, and sea-lanes. See the artist's comments for an explanation of the symbol's meanings, since I don't yet have a legend: [link]
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Hrm, it appears that in three years of being here, I still have yet to actually write a journal. I think this topic is probably as good as any to start writing them, especially since I could use somewhere to organize the links.

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So a few months ago, I stumbled across a wonderful forum by the name of The Cartographer's Guild ([link]). I've always enjoyed maps, since I was a young child, and while exploring this site, I found some magnificent maps. What really caught my eye, however, were the works by Karro, Korba, and others, in creating whole worlds from scratch, while still attempting to stick to currently accepted plausibility.

When you add that to the fact that I, like nearly every other SciFi nerd out there, have a quite deep universe in near-constant construction in my head, I couldn't resist. I decided to plunge in and map one of the planets in said universe, but knowing that I hadn't the foggiest what I was doing, I decided to pick one of the slightly more important planets for which I (as yet) had virtually no information.


[Begin limited backstory]
I knew roughly that this planet was reasonably important as being home to an important galactic shipyard, that it was named Geidor (pronounced like high-door, only starting with a hard "G" instead of an "h"; Gigh-door), and to which nation-analogue it belonged.
[/Endlimited backstory]


Even though I'm nearing completion of this map, I've decided that my gallery is currently rather misleading as to what I've mostly been working on lately, so I'm uploading a few key selections of the process on the map to here.



Stage I: Tectonics [link]
Stage II: Fluid Currents [link]
Stage III: Average Temperature & Rainfall, January [link]
Stage IIIb: Average Temperature & Rainfall, July [link]
Stage IV: Loose Climates [link]
Stage V: Continent Roughing [link]
Stage VI: Land Textures [link]
Stage VII: Water Textures [link]
Stage VIII: Rivers [link]
Stage IX: Supplementary Texture work
Part 1: [link]
Part 2: [link]
Stage X: Image Finalization / Preliminary Print I [link]
Stage XI: Cities, Roads, & Sealanes [link]

I'm not currently happy with the cartouche, in relation to the intended theme of the map and current map icons, so I think I'm going to be re-doing it, soon. I also have to label this, and most likely create a legend, so those will all be combined into the next step.

Stage XII: Cartouche, Legend, and Labeling (Coming soon...)

-asp