Kingdom of Kenland

[Edward II of Kenland]

I decided to scrap my new mountain style as I don't feel like I have the capabilities to make it look good.

Instead I redid the brushes, and I think it may look a little bit better but I'm still not really satisfied. =-/

Because the scale of my map is so much smaller than most maps I think in order to actually get it right I'll need to actually learn how to draw.

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[Edward II of Kenland]

I really think I'm getting somewhere!

I think this may just be the final version of this mountain range!

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[Edward II of Kenland]

I'm trying out a new forest style, going back to the sort of textured version I tried earlier, but better this time. I like this but I'm not sure if the individual tree style is better or not. I am worried about the color here, so I may change it to be a little less saturated.

I was inspired by the way Azelor made his forests in his Kingdom of the Clouds map.

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[Edward II of Kenland]

So I've decided to scrap the county borders entirely for now as I think they clash with my chosen color palette. I may revisit them later on, but as of now I don't see how I can make each county border distinguishable without all of these clashing colors.

I've also completely overhauled most of the forests into what I think is a better style. I think aesthetically It looks a hell of a lot better than it used to look.

The following are a few snippets of the map and indicate how different areas of the map now look. Its really starting to come together!

One difficulty I am still having is how to depict a river going through a forest. The current way of just putting an outer glow on it looks weird.

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[Azélor]

It looks pretty good, well especially since you took inspiration from one of my maps .
For the river, I would instead split the forest in two.

[Edward II of Kenland]

Thanks Azelor! I think your suggestion does make it look better!

I've done a lot visually with the map since the last update. I've changed my world map around and have Kenland acros the sea from a land mass now and have changed the crappy older landmass in the south. I've added a border (which was pain in the ass due to my aspect ratio, and even now it still doesn't tile completely correctly). I've also added in a big ol wall of text explaining the Kingdom as well as its Coat of Arms and various other banners denoting seas, the weald, and the ocean. Currently really skeptical about how to place my exposition banner though. Kingdom info is written in-universe and is based off of medieval styles of writing, thus the incredibly over the top flowery religious language.

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[Edward II of Kenland]

So my undergrad studies are now done, and I've gotten my hands on an Intuos Draw tablet, allowing me to actually draw. I've embarked on a new mountain style that doesn't rely on other's brushes. I've drawn the outlines of the snow covered tops of the mountains and now have the non snow covered parts left. I've also created a brush set for placing hills and a moor texture to represent uncultivated lands that I'm actually somewhat proud of. I am somewhat worried that the hills I've drawn will stylistically clash with the top down style of the mountains, but I'm not sure just yet. Unfortunately the redrawing of the mountains will necessitate me redoing my rivers... again.

mountain WIP.jpg

[Edward II of Kenland]

So I think I have my mountain outline done. The scale is 22 pixels to a mile, so from top to bottom the picture shows about 143 miles.

If anyone has any critqiues on making realistic mountain ranges, my style, etc. feel free to respond! I sort of learned how to draw a little better with the tablet as I went along, so the top ones look more wonky than those on the bottom.

Bottom picture is I suppose the most fleshed out area of the map, and is probably most indicative of what it will look like when finished.

mountain test.jpg

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[Edward II of Kenland]

Alright, I've spent about 2 weeks drawing roads. Yellow outline is for stone roads and red outline is for dirt roads. Doing this has shown me that I need to add more towns in certain areas and along rivers. (I actually counted using the count tool and I have something like 3500 towns). That will probably take me another week and then another week to add in those additional roads. In addition I need to add in more stone roads to some of my major cities (Which have pops of 5,000+, currently have about 16ish of those)

In addition I have redone the upper half of my mountain range, and it looks much better, I just need to style it better so it fits in better. Not sure how to do that just yet.

I apologize for the quality of the image, the size had to be drastically reduced to even upload the image.

Kenland roads WIP.jpg

[Edward II of Kenland]

So I took about a 3 month break on this and have been working on it most weekends since I came back to it. I've added a ton more cities and villages and the roads that connect them in the north west section of the map, with the goal to add the same similarish density to the whole of the map (with of course variation, but looking at the stark difference between before and after it didn't sit nice with me as it was before.) Since then I have upgraded to an SSD and 16gb of ram, which now actually allows me to work on this massive beast a little quicker.

Looking at this some more I'm starting to get discouraged that my rivers are looking weird and that the places of origin don't looks right. I may redo many of them again, for the 6th time I think. I just wanted to post a picture and see what you guys thought of them, if anything at all, and whether or not they are worth redoing.

kenland rivers.jpg

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I suppose I can also share what a mostly finished section of the map looks like too, (what I hope the rest of the map to look like) since I haven't done that in this thread.

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