Tuesday, July 9, 2013

Maps for Sanctuary Spaceship

Here are the schematics for the interior of the biosphere in book 3 of Jezebel's Ladder--Sanctuary. The book is in the final stages of polishing, and the beta-readers voted that pictures would help their enjoyment. The square box in the lower left is a hectare, the base unit of metric land area, 100 meters x 100 meters.

My pencil sketches were far to detailed to show up well on an ereader screen, and the fonts had to be pretty big. So I compromised--I tried to label everything mentioned in the story but just give the flavor of everything else. That way, the reader is free to imagine other details.

I drew the precision work-- the sphere and sunlight windows-- in a CAD program my wife uses for quilting. Unfortunately, the quality degraded when I had to write it as a JPG to import it into Profantasy CC3. With the mapping software, I added terrain, rivers, labels, and lakes. On my first attempt, I printed the result from Profantasy and saved it as a JPG...of the same name as the background. Everything came out like double vision. I had to scrap it and draw the maps over again. The shading for the water was added in MS Paint.

Because Kindle Paperwhite has problems with maps, I reduced the resolution to 50K for the ebook version. The paperback should still be at maximum quality.

I have a third diagram for the entry/dock area but I'm not sure it will add anything other than more delivery fees.

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