It's the water in the left, it's been flipped upside down but it really isn't that hard to see. I did notice when Twilight/flux was on, it becomes difficult to distinguish. This implies to me it's probably also hard to see if you have color blindness. Try looking at the black and white to see the shape if it's hard for you to separate the color version. This region has been mapped like 4 times before as pen and ink and is not even remotely unplanned. I'm not going to show you any of the previous maps of the region though, because you'll just say something mean about them too.Originally Posted by Kisachik the Wanderer
I don't see either of the base shapes anywhere...And the image looks like a very grainy close up photo of something very rusty. It's full of what looks like rendering errors.
I'll be honest, I'm personally insulted that you imply it's a completely unplanned rendering error. The words "out of my depths" were a joke in relation to the fact that I'm trying to do a depth map. I have been doing map artwork professionally as my main source of income for multiple years now, I don't make amateur mistakes. However, sometimes I try new things. Consider this a very fancy doodle. I will never stop sketching unplanned artwork and text, at some point, you do have to pull it from your brain for the very first time, and hand-drawing numbers is part of my process for that. Most of the time, my first pass for text is a sketch to see how it would fill in the area.
If you think that's the intended end result, well, it might be, because I did this for funsies and don't know if I'll have time to complete the rest of the UI concept I have, because I have clients who have deadlines.
Finally, I'm going to talk about the Critique Sandwich, which is when you don't come at someone with a 100% negative post but instead only say something if you can also pair it with something that tastes nice. You only have 20 posts so I'm just going to assume you only participate in social media and didn't actually think about the potential consequences of your post, since social media is a breeding ground for 100% negativity, which is easier to slap off like a mosquito when it's 130 characters long. When I was a young forumer, I used to critique like your post demonstrates, enthusiastically, negatively (though I would have described it as something else and I'm sure you will too and come up with a stream of justifications as to how it "helps you grow").
Sure, if I'd asked, and if you had an actual competent response for how to handle my next moves. However, you provided no good direction other than "burn the whole thing down." Wow! Really think about that. And really think about the resulting effect I had on the communities where I was serving up such criticisms of people's work.
It resulted in me pushing multiple people away from the community in which I participated. It resulted in me causing people to immediately quit the forum. I know this, because I saw it happen.
Posts like this are also pretty much... I'd say 95% of why I stopped sharing my work in progress, and to be honest, it's serving strongly to encourage me to resume my old patterns. Right at this moment I would say it's statistically likely I won't touch this work again just to avoid hearing from you because you have provided no encouragement to do anything except scrap the entire thing, so obviously based on my emotions right now, I'm going to take that advice. Hmm, that's a useful end result.
That's not what you want to do to someone who's actually new at this and if you've leveled this at me I feel it's likely you'll do it to someone who's more fragile at a bad moment.
I'll carry on doing my job. It might stop me from ever trying this map style again and it might stop me from showing any of my WIPs, but at least it won't stop me from mapping. I probably didn't stop the people who I pushed away from a certain other community from their writing. But I did push them away from sharing their work in progress lest they get stomped on and their fragile young writer brains couldn't handle that. At the time I scoffed and was like, "well you need to grow a thicker skin to be a writer then!"
The critique sandwich means you might do something like "I like the colors! Definitely replace those numbers with a font though, they're hard to read." Now, I get that you don't like the colors. No, you don't like anything about this. I get it, you're not the first person I've had who's looked at my art and been like "the only thing I have to say is something negative and so I'm going to say it."
In the case of being 100% negative, you should reserve your comments or ask, "would you like my honest critique?" and get permission first. Apparently this helps to not crush young artists, as I was told in the past. It would have avoided bothering me in this instance, because I probably would've said, "sure! I'm trying something new with this one and don't really know how someone else would set up their file. Tell me everything you know!" But instead, you just suckerpunched me with it, resulting in me going about my day with a breakfast of "some jerk on the internet" and a dinner of "I'll work on one of my commissions because wow, this art is total crap, just like I thought, it's not worth my time to continue or to share works in progress."
