Finished my first map.

[thepinksalmon]

This is my first foray into map making. It's obviously very heavily influenced by the Saderan tutorial. The land, water, and final comps were done in Photoshop. The labels and decorations were done in Illustrator. It was a lot of fun to make and I plan on fleshing out this world with a variety of other map types.

worldMapBase_final.jpg

[Obbehobbe]

Nice and smooth map, but I think the rivers are hard to see.

[thepinksalmon]

Yeah, they did kind of disappear didn't they. This might've been a case where I favored "realism" over style. Wider rivers would be kind of weird at this scale and not surrounding rivers with greenery seemed just wrong. Oh well, it's a learning experience.

[Gamerprinter]

In my opinion, maps are always representations of geography, and not aerial photos. I would never put clouds in a regional map (for example), as clouds aren't permanent so don't belong on a map. In the case of rivers, which mostly can't be seen at all from a satellite view. Unless a river 10 or more miles wide, you'd never see it. But in a map, I show all rivers (all major rivers, anyway), and in no way are they depicted as reality. These are supposed to be maps, not aerial photos - true scale reality doesn't belong in a map. If you want things that accurate call it a photo and not a map.

Sorry, I don't mean to be that hard on you, but over-realism in maps is a problem especially happening for new cartographers.

[thepinksalmon]

Hey, no sweat about the critique, Gamerprinter. Your point is well taken. Having read your comment I went back to look at my file. It turns out I messed up when masking off the rivers. So it was a technical error rather than a stylistic one. Here's the map I had meant to put out:

worldMap_fixedRivers.jpg

[Coriolis]

Much better. Have some rep. The rivers are far more obvious. I like the compass roses and radial lines, too, and your ocean texture is really good.

Some minor points:
-Consider assigning some numeric value to your scale.
-Consider having your rivers widen at the mouth, or give them a delta. They seem to be intersecting with the water in a slightly unnatural way.
-Consider using Wilbur to add some little coastal streams and rivers. Arsheesh covers this well in his Eriond tutorial.

[arsheesh]

Great job for a first stab at things. I think it is a very attractive map, though I am not sure that I think bright red and yellow border colors are a good compliment to the muted softer colors of your map.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh