Noob training 101: Please, halp!

[Wingshaw]

Well, chick has beaten me to most of the things I was going to point out. Here are my suggestions (sorry for repeating what she said):

--labels I: an outer glow would definitely help readability. I would recommend, rather than making the glow white, use the eye-dropper tool to select a colour very similar to the background parchment, and then make it brighter and less saturated. White could end up looking strange against an aged paper texture. Another thing you can do, instead of using an outer glow as Chick said, you could just create a layer below your text but above all of your other layers, and paint a blob under each label that hides what is below. This is more work, but if done with care and delicacy can look good (the advantage over outer glow is that it would look less regular and digital; for someone new to this, though, outer glow works fine).

--labels II: some of your labels are very blurry. For example, Goldenport and Wayfarer Belt are quite hard to interpret, and the label in that circular forest to the north is completely unreadable. This is due to blurriness of the text, overlapping features underneath, and the elaborate decoration of the font. If you can reduce the blur, you'll improve readability. Also, moving some labels may be worthwhile. For sites/settlements, there is a usual pattern of having straight labels (not on curved or angled paths), and trying to place them close to the settlement to the right or left. For example, if you moved the label for Newport to sit just above-left of the town icon, and so not overlapping with the islands and coast, it would look better.
------you can do the same with Goldport
------Fort Galen could be moved to the lower right of the site marker
------Blackport could be made into a straight label (not sitting at an angle), but is probably best kept in the bay where it can fit
------Gogota is better, but another convention is to favour the upper right, then upper left, then lower right, then lower left, then centre above, and finally centre below. Since you have the space, I think Gogota's label should move to the upper right.
------Megadrome, Rorak and Astrya (I can't even tell if that is the right name) could all be moved.
------etc.

--labels III: try to remain consistent with the font, and size of text. Thus, all settlements should generally have the same size text (you can make it a bit bigger for capitals, but not much); all mountains should have the same size font (sometimes people use a different font for mountains to settlements, but for now, I'd stick with the same font). Try to keep the text consistent in darkness, too: eg. the label Infis is clearly darker than the compass rose. Another common thing people do with labels is to make them a very dark brown, rather than completely black.
------Your mountain labels, I think, are too big.
------The label for Gogota is, I think, a good size for all settlements;
------Brownfields is a good size for all geographic features;
------your sea labels could probably be made smaller, but often they are allowed to be the largest label on a map (not including the title).
------you mentioned that you deliberately put Infis and the compass rose overlapping? I agree with chick: I think it would look better if the title sat below the compass rose.
------Oh, and--no offence--the font beneath your legend is just silly. It simply doesn't match the rest of the map, although I can see that you may have chosen it for legibility.

--colour: your map seems to make a very selective use of colour. The faint green glow around the northern forests/swamps, but absent in the south, and the comparatively bright yellow in the southern badlands, make those areas stick out too much, in my opinion. It might be intentional, in which case disregard what I have to say. My recommendation to you is to either a) add a (very) light green tone to the entire land area, or b) remove that colour and try to indicate those areas another way, or c) add a subtle colouring to other features, like mountains, hills, grasslands, farmlands etc. (a. and c. together is probably the best option, in my opinion). At the very least, however, I think you should make the colour consistent--the forests on the southern island should have the same treatment as the ones in the north.

--map elements: one notable feature of your map is the large amount of black and near-black that is on it. There are the rivers (which I'll talk about below) and there are the mountain/hill/forest brushes you've got. I think your map would look better if you dropped the opacity of each of those elements substantially. The forests, for example, which are probably now at 100% opacity: see how they look at 40%; mountains and hills: try 60%. You might need to go higher or lower than these values, but it can't hurt to see how they look, can it? Reducing the opacity will also mean that the settlement labels (which can remain dark) will show up more, and that is how it should be in a map.

--rivers: the solid black rivers look rather strange. I think there are two ways you can do these rivers: either make them so thin that they don't need to taper at all (i.e. the entire length of the river is no more than ~2-3 pixels wide), or make them 'hollow' (i.e. continuous with the sea, with a thin black outline). The first option will have the additional effect of making your map look like it is a much larger scale, which may be good or bad depending on your preferences.

--forests: I agree with chick about the circular forest in the north. As a solution, I would recommend simply adding individual trees elsewhere in the map. One of the good things about using that style of tree brush, is it can look good having just one or two trees sitting in a grassland area. Try adding single trees (or trees in clumps of 2-3) in other parts of the map, with a greater density near forest edges, and a lower density away from the forests. This should make it look as though your forests fade away, rather than coming to an abrupt halt. It is important not to overdo it, though, so keep zooming out and running a critical eye over how it looks.

--texture I: I was also going to mention the rectangles in the texture. Since you added them deliberately, perhaps you should just make them a little less obvious. Go around the rectangles and, every now and then, blur the edge so that the lighter parchment blends with the darker. Leave enough of those edges unblurred that you maintain the clear separation of one from the other. Try that and see how it looks.
------the scribbles in the top left look great. I really like them
------the coffee stain is probably too clear. Can you blur it a bit?
------like chick said, adding one or two other stains may be worthwhile (although comparatively small, I would suggest).

--texture II: also bear in mind, the effect you are going for with the rectangles is slightly ruined by the fact that it only effects the paper texture. If this map had indeed been sitting beneath a chest, and light had caused part of it to become bleached, than the text, lines, colours would also become bleached, not just the paper. I don't know how you did those rectangles; can I assume you applied them to your original parchment texture? The way I would do it is to create a saturation/brightness layer (I assume GIMP has such a thing) above ALL of your other layers, add a layer mask for the areas you don't want to appear bleached, and then play with the brightness and saturation levels and see how it looks.

--nitpick I: you have mispelled 'palace' in the legend

--nitpick II: your settlement icons look good in the legend, but are too small to easily discern in the map proper. For example it is quite difficult to tell that that icon between Gogota and Megadrome is a palace. Simplest solution is probably just to make the icons bigger on the map.

--nitpick III: the circular forest around the mountain in the north: it looks a bit strange that there are no trees 'behind' the mountain.

--coincidence: is it just a coincidence that you have a sea with the same name as the Australian town of Cootamundra?

That's all I can think of, for now. I hope it is helpful. Feel free to ignore any of my suggestions if you disagree with them. Also, post updates when you have them; this is a great website for getting feedback. (You might want to ask a Community Leader to move this thread into the WIP subforum, or start a new thread there)

THW

[TK.]

Lot's of feedback! yay!

-- Labels I: In the map shown, I used a fuzzy Brush in a layer mask under the Labels to kinda "erase" the drawing under the labels, but it didn't solve the problem. I'll tinker some with Light and Shadow options (which is what I believe is the Outer Glow option for GIMP) and see how it turns out. Problems I can see is that I have 3 different Label layers that I used to produce the "bleed" effect for the ink, so It'll be kinda hard to get a correct setup and what layer to use it on.

-- Labels II: Placement... totally need to improve it and I concur with your points. Often times I didn't know where to put what and ended up using curved labels when simple, well-placed ones would do a much better job. I went looking into some maps around here to get an idea of where and how people do their labeling...

-- Labels III: Yeah, myself I like consistency but I was kinda lost on what should be the size of stuff to look good when looking at it. What you normally do to decide what size to use? Zoom to 100% and see how big/small it is?

P.S. (I also had a problem deciding how big/small should my trees/mountain brushes be and their relative sizes, considering they're not really correctly scaled on such map, should they?)

Sea labels...sooo, those are not sea labels but actually my continent names O.o Northern Continent is "Cootamundra", Southern Continent is "Gadash", western is simply considered "The Frozen Wastes"... where/how should I put those to clearly show that they're the continent names? Or shouldn't I label the continents into a "world" map?

Compass Rose and Title - Yeah, not that I believe it looks better, just that it was how I did... gonna change it around a bit and try to get a better setup without overlapping!

legend font - oversight on my part. Wrong font :-/

-- Color: Well, all the other stuff like Mountains, Hills, Rivers DO have coloring under them, but I suppose the old paper texture + blots layer + ink bleeding made em almost disappear.

All Forests have the same underlying coloring except for the one in the southern continent, at the top of it, where the place "Sanctum" is. That forest is called "Prunus Forest" and is a forest comprised completely of... Prunus trees and thus why the coloring was a light pink-ish...dunno if it looks good being so different from the rest.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prunus

All Mountains have a brown underlying cloring and all Hills have an orange-ish.

The yellow area in the south is a Desert, "Y'osoch, The Scorching Sea". Dunno how I should depict it to show there's a desert there but doesn't really set a defined area...thought the coloring was the better bet.

-- map elements/opacity: Yeah, I believe its really on the darker side and I thought it was ok like that because I believe that's what a real inked on paper map would look, no? I didn't try making it lighter, so I'll see how it turns out with softer lines!

-- rivers: I did those with 7px, tappering them, and then applied a stroke to RiversColor layer (Under River) using the same color I used to color the Seas and applied a Gaussian Blur. Should I try to make the Bluer higher or make the rivers thinner as you said?

-- forests: Awesome tips. I'll try that and see how it looks. A bit about what you said previously of "no trees behind the volcano"...you mean to get some trees half-showing to the sides of it? Since I'm using Multiply on those layers, how do I make it cut and not show the trees "inside" the volcano?

-- texture I: Well, yeah...the rectangles are not good. It stood out 2 much and I should focus the attention to the map itself and not the effects! The problem though, is that baddie me merged all the blot effects together...so I'll have to redo it completely -_-'

-- texture II: All the blob/stain effects were done using a combination of 3 layers (blots, texture#1, texture#2) I Brush stamped them into the blots layer and got a good combination of the texture I wanted working with both Texture layers, then Multiply-mode all of them and played with Opacity.

-- picknick I: Duh!

-- picknick II: Yeah...I also had that impression but thought putting bigger symbols would look even more strange...so I went with the *least worse* of the 2, imo.

-- picknick III: Talked about this up there...you mean there should be trees halfway through to the sides of the volcano?

-- not a coincidence: As I said that's the name of that continent...or at least should be ^_^ And NO, it's not a coincidence. Since that continent is a jungle-like, almost non-explored, dangerous land I did want something to resemble tribal and went with aboriginal names. "Caboolture" is also aboriginal, if I remember correctly is "Place of the Carpet Snake", which I thought was fitting for a swamp.

Thanks once again for the time taken to reply and to check my work! I really appreciate

[Wingshaw]

--Labels I: the bleed-effect on the ink is probably what makes it blurry and hard to read. I suggest you may simply have overdone it, a bit. Great thing about doing digital cartography, as opposed to pen and paper, is that there are usually options to undo or work in a non-destructive way. If you want to know more, I think Ravells made an excellent tutorial for non-destructive mapmaking on photoshop (check around the guild, it shouldn't be hard to find).

--Labels II:

--Labels III: Well, as I said originally, labels are not actually my strong point. Mine tend to be hard to read or don't look right, but that might partially be because I like to include large amounts of text on a map. You have correctly identified one of the tricks I use, zooming to 100% and seeing if it is legible. Bear in mind, though, that if you have to reduce the resolution (eg because CG has limited filesize allowance), or for printing, the 100% legibility may disappear. I guess it just takes practice.
------you're right, the scale of mountains and trees is not illustrative of real proportions on a map, but that is, to my mind, one of the wonderful things about maps: we use images to symbolise different things, where a single pictograph can relay a whole lot of information. That is why it is OK to place aesthetic considerations ahead of realism when selecting the sizes of your brushes (being consistent, however, is another matter).
------one way to do continent labels that I have seen to be rather effective is to have them sprawled across the continent. If you take this path, things to bear in mind are a) you do not want it intersecting with any other text, b) you could do it as a low opacity but large font size, or c) a different colour (and one that is low contrast, is probably better), d) if having the label in the sea, it is probably best to keep it straight as well--in fact, I think straight labels are always preferred (exceptions are obviously linear features, like mountain ranges, rivers, roads), e) you have already done this, but checking out other maps is a great way to learn--in my opinion, Viking's Skenth and Arinthia maps are among the best on the Guild, and he has a great talent for labels.

--Colour: hmm, I guess the problem with the colours, then, is that they are not consistent. The desert is bright yellow; the swamp is bright green; but the mountains and forests are so subtle they almost disappear. I'd suggest:
------to reduce the brightness of the swamp, perhaps try a grey/brown/green;
------to reduce the brightness of the desert, perhaps aim for a more orange colour, and desaturate it a little bit. You can also try drawing dunes and/or just dots to represent sand drifts
------to increase the colour of the mountains, add a slightly pale grey/brown/white, and make it stronger at the mountains' peaks and weaker at the bases
------to increase the colour of the forests, maybe just, you know, increase the colour. Only a little bit, though.
------I think if/when you reduce the opacity of the map elements like trees/mountains, the colour will come out even more (that is probably the other reason the colours look imbalanced right now: because the forests and mountains have great dark shapes, and the swamp and desert are comparatively empty).
------if you want that southern forest to be prunus, I think you should show the difference with tree shapes as well as colour.
------it may be worthwhile expanding the spread of the coastal blue, also, and allow it to fade gently

--map elements: I don't think that the lines are very realistic of historic maps. I doubt it was possible to get truly black ink in the past (I may be wrong here; I haven't done the research); it would usually be a darker brown or grey. Add to that the fading effects of time (which your paper texture implies has passed) and the lines should be becoming relatively light. Try softer lines, but I suspect the easier and better option is simply to drop the opacity.

--rivers: make 'em thinner. Definitely.

--texture I: you'll have to redo it, but, on the plus side, it is more practice, and that can't hurt.

--texture II: I stick by what I said above: a slight blur is probably necessary for the coffee stain.

--nitpick II: also stick with my previous opinion. Larger icons would be better. At the very least, if it doesn't take long you can try both (leaving both layers in the file and simply turning one off/on as necessary) and canvas opinions here at the CG.

--nitpick III: yep, trees halfway through the volcano. How do you stop it showing through with multiply on? Simple, but time consuming: use a fine eraser tool, and erase the bits of the trees that overlap.

--coincidence: maybe try and make Cootamundra look more like the wild land you want it to be. Try using different tree brushes (coniferous or jungle, for example), more trees in denser clusters (again, if they overlap, you have to erase by hand--it is crucial to be careful with your layers when you do this).
------Yeah, there are some great aboriginal words in Australia: eg. the town I am from, Canberra, meant 'meeting place' in the language of the original Ngunnawal people. It's a rare pleasure to see Aboriginal influences on a map.

THW

[Deadshade]

THW already did some very good comments so I will only stress what hit my eye most.

- the yellow desert. The brightness/contrast is not consistent with the rest.
- the many squares. I can buy one chest but not a dozen. Besides a chest would affect everything (parchment AND symbols). I would not try such an elaborated effect on a first map because it distracts from focus on the map.
- the rivers. Definitely too thick, too straight and too black

Amusingly I just found the first map I did way ago with the same tutorial like you. It has quite a few flaws but I figured out that I would have to treat the rivers like THW said. Of course it would look much better if I tapered them a bit (too long 1px lines) but I did this exercise like you - just to learn GIMP and not to care about details like tapering more realistic rivers.
Here's how THW suggestion looks :
Labels.jpg

[TK.]

So, I decided to create a WIP thread as advised with my new iterations:

Here: http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...440#post260440