Arnan - WIP

[cjs0216]

So I was up real late last night working this map and I beleive it looks pretty darn good. There's still a lot to be done, but graphically, it's probably the best thing I've ever done in Photoshop. I cut down the number of rivers and I'd still like to add some moutains, so if anyone could point me in the direction of some mountains that might fit the style of my map, it'd be greatly appreciated.

[Diamond]

I love the colors on that; very rich and yet subdued. Honestly, the only thing I'm not too fond of is the coastal rings. Not only are they too crisp and also pixellated in some places, but they're so dark they take away from the landmass in my opinion. Maybe try blurring them just a bit, and then lowering their opacity?

For mountains, Vandy's brushes might look cool here: Link.

[Ascension]

I think the best fit for this style is the "caterpillar" or "fuzzy worm". Hand-drawn mtns might be okay if the colors were more muted but, as is, the black lines could dominate an already dark image. Satellite style and shaded-relief would not go well at all as the former requires a different color scheme and the latter requires much lighter colors. So look in the Elements section for a recent post on caterpillar mtns or something like that by Bill Hooks (I think).

The main thing is the font has kerning problems - see that space between the t and the h in Noranthal? This happens a lot with free fonts - they're not diligently edited and I usually just throw those out cuz the extra work isn't worth it to me (I've got around 20,000 fonts but can only use about 3,000). So here's how we fix the problem: First make sure that you have a window or tab for "character" if ya don't then click on Window - Character and dock that somewhere either in the swatches and styles panel or at the top next to brushes and layer comps (I keep mine at the top). Next click on the text tool, click on Noranthal, place the cursor between the t and h. Now click on the character tab and on the left side you will see AV with an arrow on top and bottom pointing in opposite directions...alternatively just hover the pointer over the various things until you find kerning. Kerning is the space between letters and normal spacing looks odd in these special letters like the A and the V or the P and the J, etc. So we need to change that spacing number, it might say auto so just type in a number (might need a minus sign as well) until letters squish back together. It's been a long time since I messed around with kerning so you may have to highlight the t and the h before putting the new number in. Photoshop also does the same thing with tracking so you can use either one but tracking is mainly for the whole word and not just special letters or improperly kerned letters. I use tracking for spacing my letters out really wide to cover a continent with small, widely-spaced letters instead of making really big letters that cover up everything.

Otherwise the map is just fine to me, but then it should be that way eh?

[cjs0216]

I think the current map is somewhat stagnated right now as I don't know where I want to go from here nor do I know how I want to finish it. I did, however, expand on my world a bit (read a lot) and actually made a modern atlas style map myself from scratch. I know it isn't as impressive as 99% of the stuff on here, I was just pretty stoked that I looked at a style and emulated it without any outside help. The only question that I have for you guys is, do any of the country names seem a bit off? Like maybe they don't flow with the rest of the names?

[Ascension]

They should sound different from each other. If they all sounded similar then you'd expect that all the nations were inhabited by the same type of people.