My Turn to Say Hello

[Joshua_101]

Hi everybody,

My name is Josh and I am a graphic design student at Niagara College in Ontario, Canada. Ever since first picking up a d20 in '97 I have been most interested in the cartography aspect of RPing. Every time my D&D group got together through high school I'd be the one with the gridpaper and ruler sketching out our dungeon crawls... constantly asking the DM: Does this look right? Are these rooms accurate?

I've been actively creating detailed maps for the better part of 7 months now to flesh out my D&D3e PBeM on Rondak's Portal called Epic of Aeons. I use mostly Adobe Photoshop and occasionally Adobe Illustrator to create my maps because I own a Mac (so no CC for me) and I am most comfortable with design proggy's because of school.

Right now I want to learn to create overland & worldmaps with some amount of convincing realism. I'm especially trying to get my mountains and forests to look right the way I want them.

At this point I am looking to refine and build on my self-taught skills as a cartographer so I'm looking for all the criticism I can get! Eventually I'd like to have a career in advertising media or work as a designer/cartographer for a company like WotC.

Here's a sample of my latest map, Elsir Vale. I'm about run "The Red Hand of Doom" module for my players, but I have to fit into a homebrew world so I'll have to modify many of the maps that came with this product.