Super Noob

[DrBasseri]

This is my basic outline of my map. The story starts on the top left continent, near the eastern/upper border, then progresses south and then finally East (the eastern ocean area is approximately 1000 miles, and there is a 500 mile desert from the border going inland, making low level adventurers at extreme risk of death if they choose to trek the large desert)

My question is, how do i go from here? I want to make an ocean and such and then add mountains and forests, but I do not know how to. I have Adobe Creative Cloud and a Wacom Intuos Pro tablet.

I have seen on other peoples gorgeous maps that they have a coastline that shows little curvy lines to illustrate waves, but I have no idea how to do that lol

The extent of my skill is drawing mountains and cities by watching and imitating fantasticmaps . com website. (It actually inspired me to get PS and the tablet and recommended me go here for help)




outline.jpg

[Chick]

Hi DrBasseri, That's a nice start. Good layout and nice background. I have a couple of quick suggestions before you move on to another step.

1. Make your coastlines just a little more irregular, more small jags, a few small bays and peninsulas, just to make it more realistic. Here is an example of what I mean:
http://www.cartographersguild.com/al...chmentid=68790
or
http://www.cartographersguild.com/al...chmentid=72441

Your coastlines are just a little too straight and long to look natural.

2. Leave yourself room on the map for a title and legend. Don't have the land masses go all the way to every edge and corner.

If you mean the curvy lines to illustrate waves like the ones in my Calisdania map (link above), get your 5th post in, then PM me and I'll explain how to do it.

I'll look forward to seeing where you go with this map!

[DrBasseri]

Thanks for the advice! I redid the outline, made it a bit small, and tried to add more realistic coastlines; what do you think?

outline.jpg

[Chick]

Thanks for the advice! I redid the outline, made it a bit small, and tried to add more realistic coastlines; what do you think?

A zillion times better!! Nice job

Hopefully you have kept the coastline layer and the background parchment layer separate. So use the select tool to select all of the area that is outside your coastline, and on a new layer, fill with blue. That will be your ocean. Then you can start playing with textures, colors, whatever you want the ocean to look like.

[DrBasseri]

woo hoo! THanks! I used the bucket to fill in a blue. Is that how you do it? I have 3 layers now; background, layer 1 (which is the outline) and ocean! Im color blind so what do you think of the blue?ocean.jpg

[Chick]

It's great. It's very dark, kind of a royal blue. But I'm thinking if you are colorblind, you might consider making greyscale maps. They are very popular and every bit as useful as color maps.

You can look through the albums here on CG to see some of them. If you are going to put in all the work to learn how to create maps, just go for the style you can do best

[DrBasseri]

Ok ! Lowered the blue haha, so far so good. Whats the next step!

[Chick]

When you are happy with your ocean texture, you are ready to start adding terrain elements.

For this, I recommend the tutorial here: http://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=10655

That is written for GIMP, but it's easy to do the same in photoshop, and I converted the brushes to photoshop brushes. There are lots of mountain and tree brushes for photoshop around the web and here on CG. If you just do some searching, you can find ones you like. If you don't know how to add brushes to your photoshop, there is plenty of tutorial help around the web.