WIP - Tirwen

[The Stoat]

I really like your style. It reminds me of the style Le Guin use in Earthsea books for pictures and maps. A thought on the sites, it would depend on if you could group them some way you could use that to name them. For example if they are all hazards you could name them dangers and mark them with a tiny skull. If they are all just significant location you could just label them as Noteworthy and keep the x. This sound like some pompous fictional academic to me but it fits how artistic the map is.
Over all I think the map is quite beautiful.

[waverlyt]

tirwen15oct2008.png
Changes:

• Added an island and village off in the NW
• Fixed lake/river borders
• Fixed Viridian Mountains
• Made distance scale slightly more transparent so that it looked similar to the nearby text
• Pag Mell shares its northern and southwestern borders with the rivers in those areas
• Blurred 'dune lines' in deserts
• Fixed the tree growing out of the Moritu River on the Dalmere forest border
• Added the trees I mentioned above around Lake Tondo...not sure about these yet...
• Added the last couple coast labels

I went through two revisions of the mountains and ended up scrapping it all and going back to the originals. I'm sure it's just because I'm used to looking at them, but I've come to like how the mountains that are there now look.

Pag Mell didn't get its bamboo for similar reasons; I just couldn't come up with something that I liked. I think, though, that it's something that can be left up to description during a game.

I have been lurking in this thread from the beginning. I just have to say you have a really unique style and I repped you for it. Somehow your map looks to me a bit like a medieval tapestry. No critique for now, you have done some good improvements.

Thanks for the compliments! It's funny that you mention tapestries; when I first started, I was using a canvas texture instead of an old paper texture because I wanted it to look like a cloth map.

I really like your style. It reminds me of the style Le Guin use in Earthsea books for pictures and maps. A thought on the sites, it would depend on if you could group them some way you could use that to name them. For example if they are all hazards you could name them dangers and mark them with a tiny skull. If they are all just significant location you could just label them as Noteworthy and keep the x. This sound like some pompous fictional academic to me but it fits how artistic the map is.
Over all I think the map is quite beautiful.

Thank you much! I'm still not sure what to do about the 'other sites.' I didn't want to add more lines to the legend at first because I had it looking very balanced; the city legend and scale took up similar amounts of visual space. I'm worried that the three lines on the legend side I have now unbalance it already, and I don't know what else I'd add to balance things on the scale side if I started adding more symbols/lines.

[The Stoat]

For the legend you could move the scale below the legend items, and make two columns of the legend items. Divide the the other sites into two types, maybe danger and wonders, or any other good and bad designation. Keep the x for the bad places and use another simple icon for the good ones, maybe a little spiral.
One thing I think of is none of the artistic maps are the type of map I would create of my personal surroundings. If the map is to represent a map drawn by someone of the world let the fictional person decide. Let the map tell you how the fictional person drawing the map sees his world.