Dreamlands

[tjecce]

Hi!
I've been visiting the Cartographers Guild occasionally for a year or two now, and wanted to show something.

This is a map I made for a fantasy adventure I hosted once. It's the first (and so far, only finished) map I've made, and I made it with the help of a great tutorial I found here (can't remember which one though). I could use some feedback, since I plan on trying to make more maps from now on.
DrömvärldarnaFärg.jpg

[Azélor]

This make me think of the Ravenloft campaing with it's mist seperating the different part of the map. It's cool for horror or mystery campaing. It help to set the mood.
If I can give you a tip it would be to smooth the coast (the grey zone). Something more like the rest of the map but more opaque so we still know there is a coast.

[Vagabondage]

If I were you, I would tone down the "Filter>Render>Clouds". I understand they're useful in creating texture, but anyone who is familiar with Photoshop or similar fractal effects will find those distracting. A good rule of thumb when using generated filters is to them as subtly as possible. They're also compositionally confusing since they are of the same value as parts of your landmasses and there is such a large empty space on the right. If you put your image in grayscale, you'll see what I mean. Your focal point should clearly be the large landmass, but because the value of the clouds is similar to that of the land, the eye wanders. Just tone it down, crop the image, and things should be peachy keen.

clouds.JPG

[Lingon]

Really nice work, it has a quite mystical atmosphere. The lovely place names are part of it

I agree with Vagabondage about the ocean size, it looks unnecessarily big. I'd crop it just east of Celephais, and write "De förbjudna länderna" with an arrow pointing in their direction. I don't think there's a problem with eye-wandering though – my eye didn't, anyway The landmass has enough contrast to draw the attention and enough detail too keep it there.

A thing I noticed with the font: while I like it and think it fits with the Lovecraft theme, it doesn't look very good when curved as the line above the letters break. Don't know if a different text editor would help – I've read that vector programs handle curved text better than raster programs – but it could be fixed manually.

[Azélor]

Really nice work, it has a quite mystical atmosphere. The lovely place names are part of it

A thing I noticed with the font: while I like it and think it fits with the Lovecraft theme, it doesn't look very good when curved as the line above the letters break. Don't know if a different text editor would help – I've read that vector programs handle curved text better than raster programs – but it could be fixed manually.

the easiest solution would be to pixelized it and fill the gap in a program like photoshop or paint.

[tjecce]

Thanks for the tips! I will keep this in mind when working on my coming maps

I hadn't even noticed that the line breaks, but now that you mention it, it becomes painfully obvious!

I have a project going on. I'm still building the world however, so not much has been done on the map yet (except the parts I haven't been able to keep myself from).