The World Map of Aerda

[Skyeshard]

Thanks for the feedback! I should redo the coloured map to the projection scaling. However, I'm not terribly concerned at this point making it perfect to a globe, at least not yet. I'm still just learning how to make a map in general. I've considered taking out the poles on the top and bottom, mostly because I don't know how to shape it to resemble an actual land mass on the globe projection.

[Charerg]

Thanks for the feedback! I should redo the coloured map to the projection scaling. However, I'm not terribly concerned at this point making it perfect to a globe, at least not yet. I'm still just learning how to make a map in general. I've considered taking out the poles on the top and bottom, mostly because I don't know how to shape it to resemble an actual land mass on the globe projection.

The easiest way is to just use GProjector to essentially move the pole to the equator, then you can easily map it as you would normally, and just switch the pole back (again, using GProjector). GIMP also has a feature called Polar Coordinates (Filters->Distorts->Polar Coordinates) that you can use, although it unfortunately tends to make things a bit blurry (whereas this is not the case with GProjector, so I recommend using the latter for this). With GProjector, choose Equirectangular Oblique projection, and then you can specify where you want the map to be centered (default latitude is 0 N, you can change this to 90 N to center the map on the North Pole, save it and do your mapping, then reload into GProjector and input -90 N to change it back to the original). Although I should note that there are some resolution limits with GProjector. The official one is 7500x3750, although I've only been able to use 6800x3400 without crashing the program.

Edit:
That said, I also recommend making it a habit to regularly load your map into Map to Globe to check how it looks in 3d (for this, the map needs to be in the equirectangular projection). It's very easy and fast, and gives you a way to swiftly check what the actual planet would look like. As usual, all this is somewhat irrelevant if it's not a concern to make the map fit a globe, but it's good to be aware of.