Ainehinen - Regional map for a fantasy project

[Jikarosa]

Hello people! This is my first post to this forum even thought it's been a long time since i registered here.

Here is a map I made for a fantasy project about two years ago. I was going to post it here at the time but somehow I forgot it until now. It took me about 30 hours to do this in Photoshop CS4 using my old wacom Graphire 4 tablet. The project file has something like 90-100 layers and it is really painful to work with because of the really large file size and memory usage.

Names in the map are in Finnish so they may sound weird for some people

ainehinen.jpg

What do you people think?

[Freodin]

I think it is great! Wonderful clear style!
Then it is only a very minor point of critique that it is exactly this clear style that leads to such a sharp egde between forests and mountains... when in realitly these two should overlap up to the treeline.

The main point of critique: I hate hate hate it when people post finished maps in the WiP threads, thus leaving me gaping at their beautiful maps without giving me a clue of how they did it.

[EricPoehlsen]

The map has an interesting, very clean style. The mountains appear pretty 'bulky' and unpassable but it looks intentional. Some kind of scale indicator would be helpful. From the looks of it I would assume that the central landmass is about 500 km wide and 1500 km north to south ...

[cereth]

Very nice. I like the crisp, stylized look. A legend for the different symbols might not be a bad idea either.

[Lukc]

I approve. Crisp is cool. And the font selection is very good. There could be minor quibbles, but those are matters of style and nothing else. The only thing that would really be worth adding is a legend - particularly since non-Finnish speakers probably can't read White Castle in Finnish (Beli grad in my language though).

[Sapiento]

Great style. As my fellow mappers already pointed out -crisp and clean.

[jbgibson]

I love the crystal-clear presentation, and the overall effect is marvelous. While the way this is constructed and colored leads to a lot of either/or contrasts, I too would rather see at least some of the forests stretching up the side of mountains. Also, there's some river weirdness - best explained on Kaukamaa -- one just doesn't see rivers dividing on their way to the sea; with tiny, restricted exceptions, rivers join, not divide, as they flow downhill.

Nice stuff, and especially rep-worthy as a first post - thank you! I hope we see some more!

[Jikarosa]

Thanks for your comments! I will add legend for the symbols used in the map. I will also paint better compass Before I add the legend to the image I will explain the symbols in this reply:

Circle with red star = Capital city
Square = City or major city
Circle = Village or hamlet
Tower = Castle, fort or tower
Cave = Cave

White square = Ruined city
White circle = Ruined village
White tower = Ruined castle, fort or tower