Go Big or Go Home

Everyone loves a map and this is why we’re here. These are the summaries of stories and the images that sell others on getting lost in the imagination of a creative work. Your creations are vast and need to be conveyed in their proper scope. At the top of this is the overland or wide-shot style maps. These can be world, country, region, province or even smaller scale like cities or other geographic features. “Scale” varies for any story told, but they’re all vastly important.

Tone and Thematics

An overland or “larger story” map conveys a lot, but it leaves a person wanting more. It provides depth, while opening up opportunities for imagination to run wild. Midjourney is great for this as it’s one real limitation is a lack of fine details at scale. This means that you will likely as the cartographer have to cobble together numerous maps into one larger story-telling element to eventually share your whole story. Views into this top-level mapping will extend with either variants or “zoom in” portions detailing smaller map styles, or overlays.

As shown below, what is left to the imagination?

• What does this town do?
• Is it industrial, or decaying?
• What in the world is that purple mountain about?
• on and on the questions go… just like your storytelling.

How to style for an overland map?

Top down maps can be sometimes problematic. Midjourney generally seems to often prefer angled maps. Some ideas exploring map styles and successes in text prompt inputs are shown.