World of Exodus - WiP commission map

[mearrin69]

Hi all,
I'm working on my first commission map and asked the client for permission to post the WiP here for feedback from you helpful folks. The client is Louis Porter Jr. Design (link) and the map is a regional map for that company's NeoExodus (link) product line. It seems to be an interesting world (from the one 27-page PDF history I've read) with some pretty complex politics going on (and a lot of war) - perfect for guys and girls with swords and spells.

When completed, the map will be 17"x11" (landscape). I was given a rough map showing major political bodies (attached), which I imported into CS4 and traced over with the pencil to create the land outlines.

I wanted random coastlines so I tried OldGuy's cool technique (link) but wasn't 100% happy with the results I was getting (the smooth original shape of the coastline was still pretty visible) so I started over and used brush dynamics and decreasing sized brushes to randomize the coastline a bit. After that I ran OldGuy's technique again (with one change) and it worked very well - the change was that I created a "stop" by shrinking down the landmass shapes and pasting that over the "noised up" layer so that I could really eat away at the coast...but not go too far into the interior. Don't know if that makes *any* sense at all but I could probably post a step-by-step if anyone's interested. I've posted snapshots of the drawn coastline, the roughened up version, the post-OldGuy technique version, and then the final version with a stroke (which will very likely not look that way in the final).

The ocean's pretty standard I guess: clouds followed by burn/dodge for a little shaping and then a continental shelf layer and some blending down. Will do more with the surface later but I was just trying to get it looking good quickly.

After that I drew the political borders (colored the same as the countries in the "turnover" for now), dumped on a texture, and added some "dressing" from the product line (snagged from a PDF so the quality's maybe not that great but it's temporary to get a feel. I'm out of picture space in this post so I'll post the current version and a zoom-in in the next one.
M