Hi guys, I was looking around the internet for advice and this looks like the perfect place for what I'm after.

I'm making a world map for a fantasy book, and while I like the general direction it's taking given that I'm a complete beginner, I'm getting stuck with some details that still feel bland. I'll share a few experimental images to illustrate my point (though keep in mind this is still not nearly finished work in progress and I still have many pending tasks, like formatting text and improving readability, adding cities and roads, further experimenting with textures and backgrounds and so on):

Sin título.png Sin título2.png MELVIA-colorneg.jpg mont.jpg


  • I am particularly unhappy with the mountains, they look a little bit too bland for me, and though I've followed several tutorials (including some in this site using parchment overlays), I'm having a hard time making them pop out without having them look like a stain (it doesn't help neither that the background I have makes the overlays look very bright orange/yellowish, so I've had had to just stick to low opacity/flow standard brushes with normal blending). I guess the consequence of this is that the map seems to have cohesion between open regions and mountains (though that might also partly be because I'm keeping the parchment background for the ground despite adding colouring to other features).


  • My other main problem is also related to mountains, since I believe I overdid it and drew way too many, and I'm going crazy having to manually colour the shadows and highlights for all of them (specially since I'm using a mouse). The tutorials normally stick to a very detailed handful of mountains, but I have hundreds, is there any way of speeding up the process and making them look good without having to add detail to all of them one by one?




Besides that, any general advice on how to improve the map would be highly appreciated. Thanks a lot in advance for your attention

* by the way, the city icon in the middle is not my own artwork, it's just a placeholder that I will re-draw myself when I get to that point.