Great map! You have a knack for iso views, especially for mountains, cliffs and plateaus. And some very interesting ideas too.
I wonder if you use the rivers as a mask to delete the forest where they are, then the bevel might achieve the look I think you are intending, that the rivers run through the forest below the trees. You can see this nicely where the rivers are cleared slightly wider at the rivers.
Great map! You have a knack for iso views, especially for mountains, cliffs and plateaus. And some very interesting ideas too.
Ah, Max, your sharp eyes caught the bevel...and it's true that a bit of that came from a PS layer style...but most of it was actually hand-drawn on the coastlines with brushes in ProCreate. I don't like the digital feel of the PS bevel because it's so uniform. And the beveling on the compass rose is entirely, 100% hand-painted. Whether the compass rose looks good that way or not is up to the viewer to decide, but it's not something that Photoshop did for me.
I think I could have pulled it together a bit better if I'd made sure that all the stippling and shading I did in the cartouche area was replicated in the compass rose. It would look a bit more unified. I'm definitely going to keep that in mind for next time. This map, being one of my first full maps, has a bit of experimentation going on in a few areas like that where I'm working out how I want things to appear. I tried to go back and iron it all out to a uniform scheme and theme, but there may be some places where the "experiments" are still showing.
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Open to cartographic commissions. Contact me: christian [at] stiehl.net
christianstiehl.com
@Ilanthar - Thanks very much. I think I'm proudest of the "break throughs" with regards to the canyons and the desert. It took a bit of thinking and experimenting to get those looks, and I'm still developing them. The grassland and steppe looks are hard to get right. Easily over-done or under-done. I'm still working that out. I'll put a link below to an unfinished tile for a computer game I was bidding on that shows the desert in color.
The mountains are truly just a joy for me to work on. It's almost as if making maps is just an excuse to draw mountains. I go quickly into a flow state where I'm just letting the "ISO mountain algorithm" run in my brain, telling my hand where to lay down the lines, fill in the shadows, and paint on the highlights. I still have yet to allow myself the luxury of replicating any mountains on any of my maps...though I may have to, someday, as deadlines get tighter.
Geomorph_Tile1_v2.jpg
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Open to cartographic commissions. Contact me: christian [at] stiehl.net
christianstiehl.com