This week’s WorldEmber homework challenge will have you collecting more shiny things than a magpie! It’s time to gather image resources for your long worldbuilding sprint. If an image is worth a thousand words, then you’ll be ready to complete WorldEmber by the end of this week’s homework challenge!

WorldEmber Homework Challenge Week 3 – gather and create art assets and maps

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WORLDEMBER is coming…

If you tend to grab any old placeholder image, or you find images very inspiring for your worldbuilding, then this is the challenge for you!

The aim of this week’s homework challenge is to collect and upload images and maps to your world, so you have them ready at the drop of a hat. Not only do pictures make your world look nicer, but they’re also very inspiring. A city map, for example, has dozens of potential articles hidden in its buildings, and beneath its streets!

Not only will you be inspiration-hoarding for your long sprint, but you’ll also be prepared to drop images in at the drop of a hat. That means more time writing, and less time lost searching for the perfect image.

Map resources!

There are few things as likely to unlock your worldbuilding brain as maps. If you don’t yet have any maps in your world, it’s worth picking out a few and uploading them to your world. If you run out of inspiration during WorldEmber, a very fruitful way is to have a quick tagging spree, and then create short articles about various areas in the maps. I find that city maps are particularly good for this – make sure you check out our article of resources for city maps if you haven’t yet!

If you want world maps you have a few options. One is to autogenerate a map, which is quick and easy, and maybe enough for what you’re doing. In that case, check out our article on worldmap autogeneration programmes.

If, on the other hand, you want to go it alone, you can make your own maps! Here are the 5 best map making software on the market right now (we think!)

If you want all the skill of an artist with none of the work, check out these premade maps for worldbuilding! The list includes both region maps and battle maps, but make sure you check the usage rights of the artists. Most are fine with you using the maps in your own personal worldbuilding, but it’s worth checking. It goes without saying that if you’re using your world commercially, you should always check permissions with an artist before using their work.

Character images

Character images a super useful – sometimes an image is enough to get you inspired enough to write a whole new article! Here’s a blog post about some helpful resources for character portraits that we’ve found around internet land!

 

Landscape images

If your world is earthlike then landscape images are no big deal to find. You can find some great resources for Landscape images here which should help you. If you world is VERY alien, and totally unlike earth, then this will be a much harder section for you. I’d recommed finding images wchih can at least represent some of the biomes on your world, so start creating the feeling of what the different areas are like.

 

 

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Remember you can pick up WorldEmber notebooks, hoodies, Tshirts and mugs from our store!

How to complete WEEK 3 of the WorldEmber Homework Challenge

  1. Create a list of maps and images which might be useful for your world. If you’ve completed the first WorldEmber homework challenge, you can go through your Pledge and see which images and maps you’ll need for the articles listed there.
  2. Find and upload the images to your World Anvil world, either as pictures or as maps! Remember to credit the artists!
  3. Add the images to your pledge document, so you’ll be more inspired when you look at it. You can either do this in a section at the bottom, as a gallery or next to the individual articles!
  4. Once you’re done, simply write a comment at the bottom of this blog post, and re-copy the URL of your WorldEmber 2020 Pledge Document into the comment!

 

The next WorldEmber Homework Challenge will be released on Saturday 14th November live on stream! Make sure you’re following the World Anvil Youtube and Twitch channels so you don’t miss it!