Island based kingdom

[Alexander Stukart]

Hey guys! I'm new here. I thought I'd give digital mapmaking a go (Usually I just draw. I figured best would be to start out 'small', with an island based kingdom of about 2000 by 1000 Km.

Geological map of the area:

Territorial Division into Duchies and Baronies:


Explanation:
The bright blue lines indicate the border of a Duchy. Within the Duchies you will find bright yellow lines indicating the border of a Barony.
The main reason for the enormous difference in size is geological and political. Some area's are barren wasteland, and a single Duke or Baron can manage far more territory than say, irrigated farmland area's.
Apart from that it's mostly landmarks that mark a border: A ridge of mountains, a large river or something like that.
The black circles mark a major city, note that these are not the only towns and cities in the kingdom, just the largest ones.
The black square marks the capitol city.

This is purely for testing what I can do with brushes and such mapmaking wise. Please pay no attention to the ****tyness of the compass and the Km indicators xD

Any comments and critique, be it about the map itself, or the division of the kingdom, are welcome, and very much appreciated!

[Gandwarf]

Welcome and have some rep for posting your first maps.
The maps do look cool, but they are really zoomed out and I can't zoom in. Can you attach larger versions of these maps to your post? It's hard to comment at the moment.

[Alexander Stukart]

Ha! Well to be honest: this is the best I can do. I made it at this size, you see.

I'd zoom it up a bit for you, but then it'd be really pixellish and my photoshop skills aren't all that great

[Gandwarf]

Wow, you are working in a very small frame then
I would advise you to always start at a much larger size. You can shrink an image later and it will only enhance the quality.

Anyway, I really like the layout of the island and the colors you used. They work well together. You might want to give the rivers a blue color instead of white, to make them pop out more (especially at this size).

[Ascension]

Your color scheme is very nice but unfortunately you're rivers are backwards: they're splitting up all over the place and they also join in the middle. I drew some rivers in to show something a little more realistic; they flow from the mountains to the ocean (not ocean to ocean), the branches are in the high areas and they join together as they flow downhill toward the ocean, I assumed that the areas with the big deltas are meant to be swampy areas so I put more twists and turns here as well as more rivers flowing into the area. These rivers are not geologically perfect but more of a guide, hope you don't mind.

The second one is something I can get behind as I almost always break my countries up into smaller and smaller sections just like that.

[Gandwarf]

Rivers of blood