My First Map - Trinity City

[DarkAbyssKeeper]

Working on trying to sort out a map for a role-playing project I'm running. Trying to make a fairly simple map of the City-State the characters get to play around in. I'm thinking of trying to keep it mostly grayscale with the size of map items exaggerated for effect. Going through the tutorials at the moment but mostly finding very colour/palette intensive ones or ones designed for photoshop. (I'm using GIMP with my fiancee's WACOM CTE-440 tablet from before we moved.)

Would appreciate any advice or critique (feel free to roast me, I'm aware that my scribbles are a bit rough).

This thread includes some descriptions of the areas I need to include. (The Whistle Stop Tour section.)

Trinity City Loosest Draft.png
Wow, that looked a lot cleaner in gimp than it does attached. o.O


The blue line is a river that is mostly underground/built over, not sure how to represent that on the map. Perhaps just showing the exposed parts and allow the underground parts to be inferred?

In the main file the different regions are separated into different layers, roughly by compass direction.

Sorry if this is disjointed, look forward to any advice.

Edit:
Trinity City Blue.png
Added a layer for the water, and tried to to something to represent the exposed parts of the river. Didn't turn out too well. I'm thinking this might just be a dry run for getting used to perspective and using layers properly before I try and redo this in a style better fitting the setting. (Thinking heavy blue/green/grey and more in scale like a computer read out of the area... maybe gridded...)

[Ascension]

If there is nothing built on the river or there is no river traffic then it isn't important. If there is river trade or traffic then you might try the old dotted outline or a real light faded blue.

[DarkAbyssKeeper]

Trinity Readout.png

Here's an attempt at a slightly more styled version, the idea is basically that this is what a computer shows someone who asks what's in the city. Major landmarks are blown up in size.

Decided to make the sea 'dark screen' rather than blue, just felt right. Thinking I'll completely remove the river lines.

Purple lines are underground power-lines. I'm thinking I'll make them denser where the population is denser, not sure if it makes the whole thing too cluttered though. Also need to erase the power cables visible through location icons.

Also, need to drastically improve the quality of my pictures or scale the whole map down to closer to 1000x1000...

[DarkAbyssKeeper]

Trinity Readout.png

Ran through RobA's tutorial for regional maps and got some great ideas for how to add some better effects to this. So restarted pretty much from scratch again, gone further down the road. Doing away with the power lines idea and have attempted to draw/trace out some real world road systems.

I think they'll provide a good background on top of whatever texture I use to make the ground seem less grassy (not sure what to do with that, either). Just need to decide on a colour that blends in enough to be unobtrusive without being very difficult to see. Then I need to take a second shot at doing that forest and decide on a way to represent hills.

Any suggestions welcome.