Sea of Stars and Surroundings

**professorthunder** · 03-19-2010, 11:37 PM

This is my first map in Photoshop. I am not too pleased with my lat/longitude lines, and will probably modify those to make the projection slightly more realistic.
I blatantly ripped off the titleblock, fish, and compass rose from some 1600-1700's maps. The text is in atrocious machine translated Latin. I'm not too sure how to draw a compass rose across a spherical projection like this.

Created for a RPG campaign, The Sea of Stars is surrounded by the supercontinent of Oerth. Oerth is composed of three subcontinents, which I visualized equivalent to Europe, Asia, and Africa. The culture is on the downhill side of a cataclysmic dark age, and population is extremely thin, with society huddling around a few major cities and letting the rest of the continent fester, only maritime trade and travel preventing extinction. A world spanning ocean and a few small sized sub continents are all there is besides this super continent.

I will probably do an enlarged map of the Green Bay at a later date. I've only got names for seven of the major city-states, and detail on anything more than a few geographic areas is pretty slim. Providing Poetic Latinesque names for major geographic features would be appreciated.

The coast was generated using the Cloud filter, then turned into a path and stoked with a "rake" style brush. I (both at once) love and hate the "waves" around the coast. I love them, because they generally follow the coast, but are broken enough to not appear (overly) machine generated. I hate them, because at tight radii, the brush I used to stroke the waves turns into dots, and the waves only extend a few ripples from the coast, and the lines are too thick.

I will probably add some color and parchment effects later. Thanks for any comments or helpful suggestions!

**Steel General** · 03-20-2010, 08:10 AM

Very nice, wonder how it would look on a parchment background?

**professorthunder** · 03-20-2010, 07:35 PM

Here is the semi finished version of the map, barring any additional geographic labels or coloring. I revised my longitude lines, so now they follow the surface of the sphere. I've really enjoyed looking at the work everyone else has put forth on this forum, it really inspired me to do my best!