coastal map

[Tonnichiwa]

Hi everyone,

As promised, my coastal map using Campaign Cartographer 3+. It is not specific but I think I may use it to represent one of the provinces from Kozakura, the original Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Oriental Adventures campaign based on the warring states of Japan.

I hope you all enjoy

[ChickPea]

Very pretty map once again! I kinda wish there was a decorative border of some sort around it to really set it off. Not sure if CC3+ does that kind of thing?

[Sanderling]

That's quite nice, and I especially like the colors and brushwork feel on the hills above the bay.

One thing that jumps out at me is that the largest settlement, on the top-right of the bay, is just clipping the inner shoreline with one corner of its outer wall. To me this creates a cut-and-paste look with that largest settlement, which could be avoided if you nudge the icon for the settlement just a little further up from the shoreline.

I also find the haloes around the ships and small islands to be a little distracting, and not really in line with the period feel of the rest of the map. The ship that looks most natural to me is the one on the far right, outside the bay proper, which has only a very slight halo. You might try reducing that effect on the other ships, and removing it from the small islands, to give them a more subtle role in the composition.

And I do like the grove of cherry trees in the lower left, that's a nice touch.

[Tonnichiwa]

@ ChickPea : Thanks again, glad you like this one too. Yes, you can add a border with Campaign Cartographer but I haven't really found one that I think would make the map look good. Maybe just a bunch of dragons spaced out around it?

@ Sanderling : I'm glad you like it too. Thanks for the critique. I will go back and see if I can improve it when I have the time. I can take the halo's off of everything or tone them down quite a bit. If I move the large city then I will have to re-draw the road as it breaks underneath the symbol of the city and will look very strange, but I will try it and re-draw the road to see how it looks. But it will certainly change the look of the map by a large degree. I'm really glad you like the cherry tree grove. It is a mixture of the symbol for a tropical tree and some bushes that I changed the color on and shrunk/grew in size to fit each other. I wasn't quite sure if it would be received well by others when they saw the map so I am very happy that you think it's a nice touch, thank you.

[jshoer]

This is a great looking map! Very different from many of the maps that appear around here. I always like seeing something new.

Does CC3+ provide some way to better connect the river in the southeast to the ocean? It looks a little abrupt as it is.

[Tonnichiwa]

Thanks Jshoer, I appreciate the compliment. As to the river problem, as of now I am a little unsure why the normal techniques I have used in the past to have rivers end at the ocean look and look more natural are not working in this mapping style. For some reason it just seems to want to make the rivers look weird. I've been exploring different options to try to fix it but the only real one I have come up with is to load the pic into a program like Gimp and remove the bits of the river that actually extended out into the ocean.

When using this style, if you draw the river out to the ocean you can usually use a tool to make the river snap right to the edge and then hit the redraw button to have it appear to naturally flow into the ocean. But with this style, the river won't budge. And if you draw it out into the ocean it will actually draw lines the same width as the river as far out into the ocean as you draw the line. Hitting the re-draw button has not gotten rid of those lines in this mapping style like it has in all of the others I use so I am at a bit of a loss as to how to get it to look any more natural than it does now (which I admit, isn't very natural at all.)

I'll keep working with it though and hopefully I can come up with something.

[Tonnichiwa]

Ok, I toned down the glow on the boats and the island and tried to open up the end of the river a little bit as well as moved the large city. I still can't find a good border though.

So what do you think?

[jshoer]

For the river, maybe you could load it into GIMP and take the black line from the coast inland a bit, with some fade so it blends into the riverbank.

As for a border, I wouldn't worry too much about it! I'm thinking of an exhibit at the Boston MFA a few months back of Hokusai prints. While most of them contain framing elements, there weren't usually explicit borders. Check it out. Your layout naturally contains the kinds of framing elements I'm talking about, with the way the mountains wrap around the bay. Another option might be to consider "zooming out" a little and showing the edges of the paper; you could have the lines and colors simply fade into the paper color around the edges.

[Tonnichiwa]

Hmm, ok, maybe I can get that to work. Thanks again.