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Thread: Unnamed Island with Rivers

  1. #1

    Wip Unnamed Island with Rivers

    I've been practicing with Inkscape to flesh out one of my world's islands, and I was looking for a second (or third or fourth) opinion about my rivers. They're an aspect of my world which I really want to nail down, so here it is:
    path1236.png
    Please don't mind the horrendous mountains and most of the coastline.

  2. #2
    Professional Artist Naima's Avatar
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    The river shapes are good, and realistic, what I find odd is to have two rivers come out of the same lake, I think it would be pretty rare and unnatural to have a perfectly balanced height/drainage of that lake with two rivers, one would prevail on the other I suppose ...

  3. #3
    Administrator waldronate's Avatar
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    https://www.cartographersguild.com/s...ead.php?t=3822 should offer some information about how to get your rivers in the right place. As Naima points out, having multiple rivers exit from a single body of water is geologically unstable and one or the other of them will capture the flow in short order. It's doubly true in this case, because erosion from those narrow mountain areas would very quickly shut off one of the two flows by raising the river channel with sediment.

    It's difficult to say much about the river beyond that, though, without knowing the scale of the map. The sweeping arcs of the rivers are suggestive of meanders, which are relatively local features and suggest a map maybe a few tens of miles across. The size of the mountain chains and number of rivers, though, suggest that the map is much larger. It might be one of those artistic license things, though, where you're purposely enlarging local features to be suggestive of the character of the rivers without actually showing the precise channels of the rivers. An explicit scale indicator such as a scale bar of some sort would help greatly, assuming that the map is of a scale and projection where that sort of thing would be meaningful.
    Last edited by waldronate; 05-24-2018 at 11:05 AM.

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