Hello fellow cartographers

[HTram]

Hello to everyone here at the Cartographer's Guild.

I am a GIMP user and have been for about a year but I am not nearly as skilled as I would want to be yet. For instance, I have only recently began using layer masks. I have mostly used the program to create desktop wallpapers or forum avatars/signatures for myself and my friends. I have used the program to makes maps before but my skills at the time really limited what I could do. However, tutorials here, especially those by RobA, have helped me tremendously and I definitely appreciate everyone's work.

I use to be an advert RPG-gamer though I don't find myself having the time to play as many as I use to anymore. Still, I am an active member of a RPG gaming forum where I use to help run forum based for one of it's groups. I am in the process of designing a new forum based game and have decided that I need to improve my map making skills to make the game much more enjoyable for the participants. Hence, how I came across this site. It's no wonder though that I would eventually end up at this site. I like to draw maps and have been doing so from as a kid imagining my own fantasy world to more recent road maps.

This is a practice map I am currently working on after learning a few things from tutorials. I still need to add the dirt, mountains, and forests layers.
mapwork.jpg

[jbgibson]

Welcome, HTram ! I appreciate you jumping right in, and the boldness to stick maps in your first THREE posts is worthy of a dollop of reputation. Well, a smidgen since that's all the rep I can dole out...

Pssst - if you've been working with RobA's tutorials he'd probably be pleased if you wound up routing rivers plausibly. If that lake there has two outflows, it's unlikely enough as to draw the attention of the River Police, and we can't have that. Not that they ever issue anything but polite warnings, mind you :-). Water takes the single lowest path on the way to the sea, with divisions only usual locally, or when the terrain is so flat that every way looks 'down', like the threading in a delta.

If you intend the apparent lake to be sea level, and the two connectors to be sea level channels, you'd get better plausibility by making them obviously irregular width, not the same even line of your well-behaved rivers. If you want to keep most of what you have, just break one of the connectors, into a seaward bit and a lakeward bit.

Yeah, 'have drawn maps forever' is a common background here. If you count playing army on paper, my first maps were probably around when I was six or seven. I dabbled in D&D in college, and that caused a regional map that morphed into a world map. 'Driven to improve by a game' ... matches my forays into digital cartography to support my geofiction habit. My chosen tool is Serif's PhotoPlus, and though it has masks, I haven't yet mastered them at all, so you're forging ahead where I've been too lazy to go :-). Anyway - you'll enjoy it here, with a bunch of like-minded mapaholics.

[Steel General]

Welcome Aboard!

[HTram]

Thank you jbgibson for the river mapping advice. I did plan on editing the the rivers eventually but I never had elevation in mind when designing the map. I will work on making the water flow more plausible.

[NeonKnight]

Welcome to the Guild!