I want to congratulate Dyson for just going over One Million Hits!!! It sort of amazes him and he doesn’t quite understand why so many people keep checking out his stuff. In his post about this cool milestone he says, and I quote:
“WTF people? Don’t you have anything better to do than look at someone’s characters for RPGs and a bunch of single-draft hand-drawn maps with no cool high tech work involved in them?
Hell, my maps don’t even include a grid!
Now you’ve gone and brought me over the one million hit mark. It’s almost like I should keep posting to this blog or something.”
Here is my humble opinion as to why so many people keep checking in on what Dyson is doing. Simply put, his work is honest! There is an honest quality in Dyson’s work and maps, when I first came upon his blog a few years back, it was that honest quality that drew me in. His hand drawn maps, with that distinctive cross hatching style and no grid inspired me at the time. He had developed his own style and for me, after seeing it for the first time, it inspired me. It drew me in so much, that I felt a creative need to emulate it. It wasn’t that I ever wanted to copy his style, but seeing his stuff made me want to play with that type of map drawing. My geomorphs were all done in his style, but over time my style has evolved just a tiny bit.
His maps are not simplistic, but there is a simple elegance to his style of mapping that makes his maps stand out. I won’t call it “art”, as I would never dream of calling my maps “art”. Looking at Dyson’s maps though, you can see he has a keen eye for design and aesthetic, there is always a flow, along with good use of positive and negative space. Besides all that he pumps out new stuff, quality stuff like a machine. It’s not just his maps either, some of his writing and ideas are very creative as well, very much outside the “Box” so to speak.
In closing I want to say “Congratulations Dyson” for your 1 million hits thus far, but instead of saying WTF? (as in how can this be?) it should be more like WTF? (what took so long) …LOL. Keep up the amazing work Dyson!!!!!
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