Critique request, my January challenge entry

[Lingon]

I wanted to ask for some critique on the map I made for the one-week challenge, as judging by the amount of votes it's getting, it was a total fail Because of the method I used, there's not much I can do to change it (hence, posting in Finished rather than WIP) but I plan to redo it sometime soon or at least use the style again, and while I have a few ideas on how to improve it, it'd be wonderful to hear some others' thoughts as well.

crossroads5.jpg

I know most of you don't paint with my stone age techniques, but hopefully this next bit will make enough sense for you to picture what's happening

My method:
Paint landmasses dark grey
Airbrush white for elevation
Paint ridges white with regular brush
Paint rivers black with regular brush
Color and label digitally

My probable next attempt:
Put mask on the water
Airbrush lowlands black, keeping the white of the paper for higher elevations, but not leaving any pure white.
Spray on a thin coat of white all over to lower the contrast, if it gets too dark
Paint ridges white with regular brush
Paint rivers black with regular brush
Remove mask and color with oil washes
Label digitally

That way, I'd get sharp ridges along all the mountains, avoiding the too bright highlands that allowed no further highlighting. It's also easier to adjust the height of the mountains when the sea is masked off – I would have done that for my challenge entry, but cutting the mask was too time consuming for that deadline, so I had to skip it. Painting the "shadows", dark areas, right away eliminates the need to paint the landmasses gray first, saving that step.

I'm not likely to rush into the remake, but… if you have any thoughts, I'd be happy to hear them

[Deadshade]

Well I do very similar things like you do, I only differ in that I use pencil for 3/4 of the work, then scan and color.
I also generally like your realistic style. For instance this kind of mountain shapes can be obtained directly by fractals so that one doesn't need to "paint" them and the fact that you do shows to me that you know how to emulate the fractality..
The reason I didn't vote for your map is mainly because I was bothered by the contradiction between the realistic fractal style and the utterly irrealistic global starfish topology of the ranges.

On a minor note, but I already mentionned it on the WIP thread, as you had not the time to shade the ridges, they look like flat white rivers and not like mountains which have a 3rd dimension.

But as the continents are very nice as well as the colors, for my taste if you kept only 1 or 2 mountain ranges and adequately shaded the ridges it would be (almost) perfect. Of course my taste is not necessarily shared by everybody

[- Max -]

I agree with Deadshade on the white ridges that looks like flat rivers rather than elevations. The lack of shading and the overall blurry airbrush white work doesnt really show the "sharpness" of reliefs elevation. But the continents shapes are great

[Chick]

From a geology, natural/realistic, point of view, your shapes are all off. Mountains form in long linear lines, never at right angles. Continents come together in the same way, long lines at the boundary where the plates are colliding. Continents do break apart at points, but always in three pieces, not four. The Afar Triangle is a good example (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afar_Triangle) and never where there are large mountains. Instead the lines of breakup are long linear very straight deep trenches, such as the Great Rift Valley of Africa. So for me, this picture grated on my idea of what mountains and continents look like.

The detail of your coastline is not too bad, at least it looks fractal. The islands are impossible since islands don't form in rift valleys, or in the breakup point region. Instead everything is sinking below sea level at the rifts which have opened to the sea, such as the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.

As for the art part, I think the technique to show the mountain chains is just a matter of making the peaks and slopes more distinctly defined, with coloring and lines. Once you get the mountain chain shape right, and realistic continent layout, the artistic depiction will be much easier and better looking.

[Zaianya]

Something about the vagueness of the white airbrushing doesn't look quite right (compared to all the detail of the rest of the map). So I suppose I'm just seconding what Max and chick said

I like the style itself, and I love the coastline.