June/July Lite Challenge Entry : The Borderlakes

[AlexTna]

The first thing I thought about when seeing the challenge was how it looks like a formation of lakes or maybe a swamp with deeper water zones. Tried to draw the rivers and some hills as to make a natural border between 2 cultures (The northern 2 towns and place names are mainly English or English-sounding names, while the southern ones are from Romanian, that's why the 2 main roads don't connect).
Credit must also go to Gidde for my use of his Mountains and Hills brushes (my brushes where too edgy, seemed to me not to fit this map) and also to StarRaven, the creator of "ravenbrushesv3.abr" brushes, from witch I choose the compass. The rest are my own brushes (had to make a new forest brush, less repetitive).
I am still thinking about the color theme, mainly trying to get a color scheme of witch i can say "this is it", until now i have 3 versions, not quite sure witch one to pick, I will decide in the days to come. The last 2 are very similar, the last one only has a lighter hue of green (green does seem to fit in better then tan/gold, seems to me a lake region like this with such a golden color to it isn't the best fit)
Hope you like them and as always pointers and critique are welcome!
WIP's below:

[AlexTna]

I recently discovered how to make "old paper", added it to my existing maps and played around a bit with the layer modes. These are my latest WIP's, i think I am going for the old "wild west" like map style

[Master TMO]

Yyyep.... I'm not going to get many votes this month either.

Lol. Looks good!

[AlexTna]

I wouldn't be so sure about that, I happen to like your idea a lot, very original from my point of view.

[arsheesh]

I think my favorite is the one on your left in the second post. Using the initial image as a set of lakes was a great idea, and it turned out quite well. One thing I noticed however when zooming in on your maps is that some of the symbols (e.g. the compass rose) look a bit pixelized. I'm bran new to Inkscape, but I think there's a way you can smooth out these symbols in Inkscape and then import them back to GIMP as a bitmap, all nice and smooth (I managed to do it once, but I can't seem to figure out how I did it now!). Anyway, great job.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

[AlexTna]

Any idea if a slight blur to the compass and similar objects my help make them less edgy and pixelated at high zoom?
Oh and i don't actually use Inkscape, its in my profile because I dowloaded it first, but switched to GIMP

[arsheesh]

Hm, well that might get rid of the hard edges, but you would then have a blurry compass. Don't know which is less preferable. If there is a good way to reduce pixelation of icons using GIMP, then I'm not aware of it. Afraid I'm not much help to you here.

[Jaxilon]

Well, I just wanted to see if I could smooth that out any so I created a duplicate layer of the compass, did a guassian blur at like 1 or 2, then changed the layer opacity to 50%. With the original over the top it softens it up just a wee bit I think without getting too fuzzy looking but you can decide. You can fiddle with the opacity on the layer quite a bit but if you go too far it does look blurry.

[ravells]

Welcome to the guild, Alx, glad to see you getting stuck into the challenges! Really like the composition of the map. My only slight crit is that the mountains at the top of map are a bit too repeated, but other than that it's looking good to me.

[AlexTna]

Thank you for the tip, I will try applying it first thing tomorrow morning !
EDIT: Sadly I didn't have a lot of time for map-making the last 2 days and I will have even less in the following week. I have gone back and made 2 new versions, because I am not used to GIMP all that well that I only saved my last 2 WIP's in JPG format . No big problem anyways, I just recreated the old paper layers I have done earlier, I have made a duplicate compass layer in witch i followed Jaxilon's advice. Sadly from lack of time there will be no more major improvements, I will choose one of these 2 as my map and when time permits make some more adjustments and tweaks. I had in mind recreating the whole map with more attention to detail plus adding some stuff I learned in the meanwhile, but sadly there will be no time for such a complete make-over. I really don't know if I should continue participating or retire, I don't quite feel my map is close to a "finished product" and I don't know if it will be with my lack of time, but I will state my choice until the 10th (that's when map's are "submitted" and the voting begins right?).
So here they are: