Edelu - First Serious WIP

[Zach]

Well, it's time for me to actually start my WIP thread for the first map I have made after registering here. I am going for the well-known "old hand-drawn map" style in this one. It's going to end up being about as big as my laptop can handle, about 6000 by 6000 px.

After toying with my terrain generator, I got a satisfactory alpha map, and I followed a tutorial (I forget which one, but I think it was RobA's) for the paper/parchment for it. That's all I have now, but I should get the next bits up soon.

The name of this region is Edelu. It is not being used for a story, nor an RPG, and so it has no narrative significance. It comes from Proto-Indo-European words meaning "Eating Elephant"...you can probably guess why. I like being able to be whimsical about this.

Z

EDIT: Land masses are the white region and ocean is the black region.

[- Max -]

Aee the land masses white or black?

[Jalyha]

Oh my gosh, I see the elephant in the room!

[Zach]

Here's the next version. I made a new script-fu to generate the coast rings in GIMP. This is the result of my sketching on the land and determining where I want stuff to go.

Mountains and rivers are obvious. Forests are the green shaded areas, and the brown shaded area is the Dol Rerkath desert.
Circles are villages, circles with a cross are larger towns, and the giant pentacle is a capital.

[Zach]

I've decided to do the map in chunks rather than all at once, because trying to edit the final-size image eats up tons of my system memory and the response time becomes so sluggish that I can't draw anything.

So here are the first two sections of the map, the southern bit and the left edge of the coast.

[Ilanthar]

It's looking good so far!

[Zach]

Here are the next two parts, the south shore and the capital region (which, by the way, is the capital only of the lands to which it is connected). Since they're close together I put them in one image.

The mountain range does continue north (it isn't one standalone clump there), and that is what I have next to draw.

[Zach]

Next two sections done, and I think I have done about 60 percent of the mountains (goodness me they are both fun and time-consuming to draw).

[Lingon]

The mountains and hills are really nice! The coastline looks inconsistent with the rest, because of it's fuzziness, but it should be easy to fix. If you are working in Photoshop, you can select the coastline with the wand and stroke the inside of the selection. Gimp has something similar, I think.

[Zach]

Yeah, that's a side-effect of scaling it up from 2000 to 6000 pixels. I stroked the line then scaled. I'll restroke that and it will be visible when I get the next bit done.