The Continent of Natis

[SuperGalaxy]

new_natis2_04.jpg
Created in: Photoshop

This is my first map. I made it for a book and a world I'm working on right now. I've worked on this map for months, putting on final touches, changing fonts, things like that... Right now I consider it finished. I might later refresh it to fit different historical eras, but that's a matter for later.

I used StarRaven's brushes for city/town icons, forests and mountains.

As I'm new to the guild, I would welcome any critique/suggestions.

SuperGalaxy

[ChickPea]

Hi SuperGalaxy, welcome to the Guild and congrats on your first map! I really like the colours you've chosen, and they're very striking. (I've got a fondness for dark seas. I think they look great!)

I see some issues with your rivers. They mostly look fine but you have them breaking up nearer the coast. Were you going for deltas? My feeling is that they seem to split relatively far inland for that. There are others far more knowledgable about this than me though, so hopefully someone else will give you better advice.

Purely on a personal taste level, I'm not sure if the texture is just a tad overdone on the land areas. I do like the effect, but I'd have reduced the opacity just a little to dial it back somewhat in those areas.

Overall, it's a great first map. Have some rep!

[Freodin]

I can only agree with ChickPea.

Great colour choice. Nice layout. Pretty landshapes. Good choice and usage of brushes.

All in all, a great first map...

... but the texture is a little too heavy.

[SuperGalaxy]

Thank you for all of your kind words, I noted everything you've said and look forward to presenting what I might come up with in the future.

I see some issues with your rivers. They mostly look fine but you have them breaking up nearer the coast. Were you going for deltas? My feeling is that they seem to split relatively far inland for that.

As far as I know, deltas form where rivers approaching the sea are slow and there is no tidal activity big enough to keep the mouth of the river clean. (Or in some special cases like the Amazonas river, which has just too many stuff going down at once that even the Atlantic Ocean cannot deal with it.) In my case, the Endwater and the river north to it (on the western side of the continent) empty into an extensive marshland, so they split up due to their own alluvion they put down and the stuff moved there by the sea. In the case of the great river of the Sheer, it's just very big and goes through a long flat territory. This means that when it gets to the Rarmondian Bay, it's full of debris and is very slow, that's why it built such an extensive delta.

At least that's what I was thinking, however it's still possible that I oversized those deltas or used bad logic.

[ChickPea]

I believe your understanding of deltas is bang-on. I think it's perhaps the scale of the map that's throwing me out. I has assumed it was a relatively large landmass, and so it felt like your deltas were going very far inland, but when I look at it again, if it's a smaller island, then I guess they're fine. I know there are some pretty large deltas in the world so I suppose it works. At least I know you're going for deltas, rather than just randomly splitting your rivers!

[Chick]

Your deltas are fine, it's your mountains that have a problem

Mountains form in long ranges at tectonic plate boundaries and thus mountain ranges simply do not cross at right angles to each other. That big cross of mountain ranges in the center of the map just screams "no no no" at me. Is there any way you can make that into more realistic ranges?

[SuperGalaxy]

For me it seemed quite right, and for a fantasy setting like this, I don't think we should go into such detail, but it's fun, so anyway
new_natis2_tectonics.jpg
Natis is actually on three continental plates colliding: the "Western" plate and the "Natean" plate collide to form the long range of the White Mountains (I imagined them like an over-sized Alps), while the "Harlian" plate coming from the south created the west-east oriented range in the south (Himalaya-ish). The Mountains of Fortos, Ikya and East Natis, together with the hills on the island of Ganwarkell in the West once formed a continous mountain range in the ancient geographical times, but over the millions of years, these were eroded and became much smaller. The hills of Ganwarkell are something like the Pennine mountains in England or the Appalache in the US, while the Forthron and Ikyan mountains are comparable to the ranges of Central Africa (bordering the Congo Basin).
As of the Saurn mountain in Eastern Natis, it was inspired by real Central Asian mountains like the Tian Shan or the Scandinavian mountains, which are old mountains, formed during the geographical ancient era, but raised again during tectonic plate movements of later ages. In our case, I can imagine a microplate being somewhere there, providing these forces, but--as I noted above--I don't think it's so important in the case of a map like this to explain everything with scientific care. Also, I found it unnecessary to mark the differences between mountains on the map, as its fictional creator had no idea about the aforementioned processes, given that it's a medieval setting.
(I do agree, however, that that cross-section doesn't look too pretty. )