First post & first WIP Map

[Kyros]

Greetings,

For some what of a introduction and how I came to be here.

I am avid Dungeons & Dragons fan as well as pretty much anything fantasy or sci-fi related. I got into playing D&D during my years in middle school and have into it ever since then. What really attracted me to it was the aspect of world building. I am rather detail orientated individual and I love to indulge my imagination with all the little intricacies of creating a believable living, breathing world and its inhabitants. However, until recently these voyages of fantasy were forced to stay in my head. When working my most recent project, an atlas style compendium for my most recent setting I created for a D&D Pathfinder campaign, I decided to give it a shot and try to create the world I had been forced to only visualize in my mind's eye.

So I began to search the internet for tutorials that could lend me a good starting point. Many of the websites I visited made mention of the Cartographer's Guild thus it wasn't long before I found myself here. I was in awe of many of the maps I discovered on this site and served to inspire me to give a try even more so. So I read through numerous tutorials and guides to gleam as many tips as I could.

So booting up photoshop I gave it a go.

My aim is to make a real-world styled map of the world. With its features detailed and placed as realistically as i can manage to make them. Before moving into a map of each continent and its various regions. However, I am not heavily experienced in doing this kind of work. So to aid myself in my goals I signed up here to better communicate with those who have more experience with this sort of thing.

Mainly I followed Ascensions' Atlas style in Photoshop as it seemed the most entry-level friendly. If anyone has any thoughts on how well I did, please feel free to share them. Or have any tips on how to improve the colors, textures, rivers and mountains or just general layout or a more advanced guide that you would like to recommend I would appreciate to hear from you.


Thank you.