I made an atlas-styled map

[Graham82]

I've made maps before, but never an atlas-styled map in great detail. This is kinda my third attempt at such a style. I mostly followed Kindari's instructions, but I made several changes to suit my personal taste. I used Photoshop CS6 for this purpose.


1. Mountains: Well, this is the hardest part of any map-making for me and I used shaded relief to denote mountains instead of the usual difference clouds because I wanted them to look prominent and not just some illusion of bevel and emboss feature. And I find shaded-relief more beautiful than simple bevel/emboss.

2. Feathering selection for shore-line: This part was adjusted later on, but I skipped doing this because in my map, there's a tiny group of islands within a lake. When I use feather selection and then bevel/emboss, it gives those islands an unwanted glow.

I guess Kindari didn't account for that initially. Overall, he did an awesome job with his tutorial, and if he's reading this, I thank him very much for taking the time to create such a detailed tutorial.

I've attached an atlas-styled map of sorts. It's not yet complete, but the basic bones and structure are there. Please comment and let me know what you think on my take of Atlas-styled maps. If anyone wants details on how-to, I'll gladly share my secrets. My PM seems to be off until I have 5 posts, so you have to comment below.


Oh, and I'm a nOOb here, so please don't mind if this thread is posted in the wrong place.


Experiment Tag.jpg

[justkae]

Love the relief! Great work there. Also great job with the colours and their transition

[Graham82]

Thanks, justkae

[steelmccoy]

The mountains are beautiful. Is that North America near the bottom left of the landmass, or are my eyes playing tricks on me? Also, are the dark lines rivers or borders?

[Graham82]

The mountains are beautiful. Is that North America near the bottom left of the landmass, or are my eyes playing tricks on me? Also, are the dark lines rivers or borders?

I used a continent brush to create realistic shoreline. if you look close enough, you can find North America, Australia, Africa - all in different shapes and sizes.

The dark lines are markers for rivers which I intend to edit later on. Their course is a little whacky and doesn't match the terrain.

[Kellerica]

Off to a nice start with this, certainly. It does look a tad empty now, I'd love to see a version with locations and stuff

[Graham82]

Off to a nice start with this, certainly. It does look a tad empty now, I'd love to see a version with locations and stuff

I'm working on it. Currently, I'm marking the locations but don't know what font would look good on this map.

Any suggestions?