Hello and First offering

[JLane529]

Hi. I've been playing and running RPGs for over thirty years, so I've done a bit of mapmaking along the way. Mostly pen and graphing paper, and rudimentary ones at that. I'm familiar with the barest functions of CC2/CC3, and the symbol sets had always been enough. Until my teenager started playing and joined our group.

I'm trying to expand on what I've been doing and spread my wings. I have Painter, GIMP, and as of yesterday, procreate. I don't know how to use any of them, yet, and not sure which I will start with.

This is a map for my current campaign. It's better than i expected and worse than i hoped. I did it on my iPad with Sketchbook over about sixteen hours. It represents three firsts for me.
1. First Digitally hand drawn map.
2. First hand painted map.
3. First manual use of layers [CC not doing it for me.]

Please feel free to comment, Constructive critism is the only way I will improve.

East Delving.jpg

[davlittman]

This is quite nice! The coastlines are very well-planned, as they look quite natural. One small critique would be to introduce some more variations of mountain shapes. If you look at the Tolkein map below, you'll notice that the mountains have a lot of pleasing variety in size, shape, pointy-ness, and shading. Now, Tolkein's mountain ranges violate just about every aspect of plate tectonic theory, but they're drawn quite nicely!

_89553428_tolkienmap2.png

[Weery]

Hi JLane and very welcome

That's a much better first map than I managed! Better than than my second and third, too Looking forward to seeing more as you keep experimenting.

[Tonquani]

Hi JLane,

As Weery alluded to, this is a really good first map. I may be biased as I use it almost exclusively at the moment, but I would strongly recommed GIMP. If you work through some of the GIMP tutorials on here you will learn a huge amount extremely quickly. I definitely did.

A couple of points to mention...

1. I try to get as much consistency as possible into my maps, although I often fail dismally (in my eyes at least). Labelling is one area where this is often an issue as labels often have a different background depending on where they are on the map. Some of your labels appear slightly blurred and some are sharp. Also, Fireoak is not as readable as the others due to the background. You can often solve this sort of problem by adding some sort of background to each label, something like the little parchment sections on this map by Diamond https://www.cartographersguild.com/a...8&d=1517190511

2. The grey you have used for shadows under the leading edges of the forests is a bit offputting. When you are shading, rather than using a solid grey colour, try using black on a separate layer. Then once it is all painted in you can vary the opacity of the layer and it's easy to tweak the appearance of shadows in all areas at once.

3. I absolutely love your little city/town icons. This is one area where I am yet do venture, but it almost immediately gives a specific character to each place.

Oh yes, and welcome to the Guild. You'll find a bottomless treasure trove of help and support here. Pretty much any query will usually be answered within a few hours, and as I'm sure you've noticed, there are some incredibly talented people who post some amazing work regularly. Enjoy!

Edit: Oh yes, and have some rep for a first post that includes a map!

[JLane529]

yeah, not sure why some of the text blurred. it was all clear until i added a final layer of tan at 10% opacity to tie everything together, like the final wash on a mini.
good call on the grey. it wasn't what i wanted. but it finished it in time for the session.