Hi out there, fellow map-o-holics!
it's been a pretty short year, and many of you brought forward their OGF countries a lot in those 365 days. Me not, unfortunately. I was inactive for at least 75% of the year and Norðurland still is a quite empty country. This country is so freakin' huge (well, I knew this in the first place...), I guess it will take years to fill it up with life to a satisfying amount. And the more I work with OGF and the more I come to the details, the more I recognize how hard I struggle with those details.
However, I was more active in the last quarter of the year. And for 2017, I hope that I will spend more hours here with you than last year. I admire your creativity - lots of ambitious projects on the map and beside. So beautiful to see such an active, friendly, thriving and creative commutinty evolve! We have a real nice project here (If you didn't recognized so far ;-) ).
During the last month, I mostly fixed errors from very early edits (still way more to fix here) and refined things that were roughly sketched in the first place. I finally started do work on Norðurland's still very edgy coastline with the help of a graphics tablet, GIMP and Inkscape. Things move on slowly, but they move.
At the moment, I follow 2 larger projects:
Coast refinement in north-eastern Norðurland, with many fjords, islands and lakes
Since today, Norðurland is a little bit smaller, because there is a new citizen in town: the country with the ineffable name of Ruhtinaskunta Yleväkivet (the principality of Yleväkivet) lies between Norðurland and Slavonia. The spoken language is Vinnic. This language is the remains of an older, mostly dead or further evolved language family that was spoken around the Vinn sea. Vinnic is based on - surprise - Finnish.
My goal is to focus on the full completion of that country. It is small scale and I have the feeling that I need such a small project that I can finish in a certain time. This will also be my place where I will experiment with details I haven't tagged so far. So, most of my mapping efforts during the next months will concentrate on Yleväkivet. It is a highland country with deep valleys, maybe quite like Andorra (but still a little bit larger). It forms a customs union with Norðurland for a long time. The union was formed during the military regime in Norðurland. The parliament of Yleväkivet hoped to prevent an annexion with that deal, and they were right. Yleväkivet never was annected by the norlensk regime. Until today, the souverign of the country is the prince of the house of Yleväkivet (which means something like 'noble/sublime stone').
Well, so far for now. You'll see some progress in Yleväkivet during the next week - hopefully. ;-)
Happy mapping in 2017 and a freakin' good year for all of you!