Continent Map request

[mucco]

Hello all. I'm a big fan of this site and registered because I'd like one of you high-skilled people make a nice-looking version of the world map of my setting. I will have problems describing it as I have no means to upload the hand-sketched one I did, but oh well.

I have no real time restraints. One year, maybe.
I'd like the map to be similar to this one. It's realistic, coloured, and stylish. Minus the clouds, golden outline and useless details like the vortex - I would like to have a map that is consistent and can be used for reference.

The continent I'd like to have depicted features a huge mountain range in the NW corner, that spans over one third of the map in both directions and has a further appendage towards the center. It contains a very big volcano on the W limit on the map, near the end of the mountains. South of the volcano, there's a large desert that extends South and widens a lot until it reaches a big sea. This sea takes up 1/4th of the map on the N/S axis, and 1/3rd on the other one. The sea is the end point of a river that spans the whole map: it starts off in the NE corner (where a much smaller mountain range is) and streams quickly toward the center of the map, going South in wide turns before it forms a large lake near the sea. The river then exits the lake and forms an estuary into the sea.

The whole center part of the map, north to south, is mainly flat or hilly, mostly green with lots of small forests. Hills start to become more prominent around mountains and toward the south - the area around the lake is very hilly. South of the great mountain range, the hills stop as we get nearer the desert. On the east side, the many affluents of the river mentioned above stream through a huge single forest in the NE corner. The vegetation gradually changes as the area becomes lower in altitude, becoming a swamp. There are some dry patches of terrain where small villages are, but that's it. This swamp changes again at the latitude of the great lake, becoming a barren and desolated cursed area where nobody lives. Most of the northern area is very cold, with most of the mountains north of the volcano being snow-covered.

The map I have in mind fits nicely on an A4 sheet horizontally. It would be approximately 1500x1000 miles wide. I'm not asking for anything uber-professional, of course (I'd pay it in that case!), but I would really like to have something you can look at. I've omitted cities, settlements and such - those are details we can discuss about later.

[jfrazierjr]

I will have problems describing it as I have no means to upload the hand-sketched one I did, but oh well.

Do you mean you don't have a computer(and thus are using a borrowed computer or internet cafe to post this) or you just don't have a scanner? If the latter case and are near a town of any fairly decent size, you should be able to get to an office supply type place that does scanning and it would take less than $5 or so. Or if you have a digital camera and can hook up to your computer you can then upload a picture. Or you can get use a simple paint program to draw out your land shape, using upside down V's for mountains, more rounded flattish u's for hills and some squiggly closed lines for forests or you can just use colors to indicate a rough description of the terrain.

[mucco]

I will probably be able to upload something next week. No scanner/digital camera to attach to my laptop right now. And I'm the most clumsy person ever around drawing software, heh.

[jfrazierjr]

I will probably be able to upload something next week. No scanner/digital camera to attach to my laptop right now. And I'm the most clumsy person ever around drawing software, heh.

Trust me, we have seen it all, so don't worry to much about the quality if you make something in MS Paint, Gimp, or whatever... you could even do some color coding to represent the geographic features you need. Actually color helps many times as long as you have a good key/legend.