A row of old cottages lining on both sides of a narrow road. The closest cottage has a flower basket at the window.

Come for the craptastic art and photos.

Stay for the inane ramblings.

Scottish Place Names Generator

After posting the other day about the Pseudo Elizabether Place Name Generator, I thought I'd put my rather limited Python skills to work and generate some Scottish place names. A while back, I downloaded some data from the UK's goverment website. It contained a list…

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Vintage map coastline hatching in Inkscape

A popular style of illustrating coastlines, especially on vintage-style maps, is to use horizontal lines that fade out from the coast into the sea. To clarify, this is the kind of thing I mean...

A small area of a fantasy map showing horizontal hatching from the coastline
Horizontal lines as coastline hatching

See those horizontal lines sticking out from the coast? If you fancy something like that on your map, here's how to imitate the style in Inkscape.

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Pseudo Elizabethan Place Names (revisited)

One of the most - or least - fun parts of map-making is coming up with place names. Some people have firm ideas about what they want in their naming conventions, occasionally going as far as creating their own languages to develop a truly unique world. I admire this greatly but it's not for me. I use place name generators.

There used to be a most wonderful web page called the 'Pseudo Elizabethan Place Name Generator'. It was hosted at inkalicious.com. Sadly the site is no more and, at the time of writing, the domain is up for sale. I was gutted when the site went down as I loved the quirky place names it offered.

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Inkscape fantasy map making tutorial part 15 - Final thoughts

This post is the fifteenth and final part of a tutorial series that teaches how to create fantasy maps in Inkscape. This part is really just a few final thoughts on the map making process, along with some alternative images I made, showing how easy it is to tweak the look of your map with just a little extra work.

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