One of my many failures in 2007 was to get the people at the Open Clip Art Library into holding a "month of cartography", such a benign defeat is a good show of how bad I react at losing.
A few years ago I made a proof of concept about how Inkscape can be used to create RPG maps and a (small at the time) number of terrain SVG tiles. This showed to be one of the hottest topics on my blog, with important traffic, many reactions and follow-ups (I got many people contacting me offline about it). It can be considered a success.
Recently on the Inkscape users mailing list the topic of cartography came to attention so I got the idea about holding a "month of cartography" at OCAL, we used to have such things, but the (still unfinished) migration to ccHost shifted the focus. They are good for channeling energies, gaining momentum, generating buzz and potentially bringing new contributors and users.
My approach was to make a pledge: if at least two other people back me and will contribute, I pledged to contribute at least 50 new, original, images.
The idea didn't got enough traction, nobody backed me. So here is me bad at losing: once the idea was developed in my head, I continued working on it and created (at a slow pace, due to the low motivation) the above mentioned quantity of images. So today I am halfway to this pledge: I finished the outlines (this was the hardest part) for 50 images, they still nedd to be colored (that is the second half), see below a few highlights:
For now the images are available for download as
part of my
own clipart collection, after I add colors they will be uploaded (both as outline and full-color) to the
Open CLip Art Library. The coloring process will follow at the same slow pace, probably I will make enough noise when ready.
The set is not consistent as style, scale, perspective or quality but, hey, I pledged 50 images, not 50
quality images... (could it still be labeled as a
set?) see also a screenshot with the entire set:
When approaching the target number a motivational issue appeared and I got confused about what to do next: start coloring, as originally planned, draw more new shaped, as I have in my head a large list of items which could be drawn or just call all this thing off, freeze and upload as it is.
Most likely I will stick to the plan but he work speed may have to suffer, watch the
tileset to monitor the progress.