Map for dark fantasy world (I know, generic. Will update when I've thought of a name)

[gregorius]

I fixed the placement and some colours. also removed the emboss on the edges of the isles/continents(I hate it). For next update I will probably make the stroke less obvious. I will have to start on rivers soon. I hope there is no problem with me posting here daily. I'm excited for the map.

I like the look of the revised mountains, but maybe there's too many of them now? Unless this is a very very mountainous world in which case disregard. I also preferred the flatter, whiter poles you had before; they looked more forbidding.

I have to agree with Diamond again, I really preferred the poles in the earlier versions, the map is starting to look a bit too busy now in my opinion. If you could maybe even find a balance somewhere in between I think it would be an improvement, You just went a little too far with it I think.

Thirded. The "cleaner" poles looked a lot better. Unless you absolutely need the map to show the mountains at the poles, I'd suggest going back to the previous look, or, as kacey suggested, finding a good middle ground.

Thank you for the feedback, I kind of thought the same but I thought it was only because I've been staring at it quite a long time. I have taken your feedback into account and this is the next version(actually skipped a version in here because it wouldn't upload to imgur but you can see it at http://imgur.com/a/qCxvo)

[Lucifer]

Looks a lot better now, I think. I also like the dark tone you chose for the poles in this new iteration of the map.

[gregorius]

After such a long time, i've made it to v8. Cleaned the poles, upscaled the entire map, made the mountain-transition smoother, made the high snowy points more visible, changed grid size, made the poles more white instead of grey, increased contrast for darker greens, removed the brown filter and added a deserted area.

[gregorius]

Working on this map is really slow now that it's 13k (width in px). with V9 I made it less clean, as the cleanliness was losing some of the details, changed the size to a standard paper ratio, the land mass stroke is also more overlayed, so the ice glaciers appear more like ice. The water itself has more "holes" so it looks like it has less artificially added roughness. I'd love to have more RAM to be able to work on this thing without waiting 30 mins for something to load every time I change something from the water/landmass and I want to see how it looks. I might try some different colours for the next iteration, not sure yet. I also haven't got around to adding rivers yet, making the countries, but I'll do that once I'm printing this so I can write and stuff on top of it.

[gregorius]

Been a long time since I last worked on this map but I wanted to get a beefier PC to handle the large file size. Fortunately since then I've moved from Photoshop to Affinity, and through a combination of live filters (mainly a noise one) I've managed to make a fully vector map that I don't have to work on at 13k*13k pixels. It's still a bit slow with everything that I've added on top but i find it to be much cleaner since now I can just manually add islands and the water rings and everything is done automatically, and now the doc is only 100mb instead of totalling at a few gigs.

Anyway, I've changed to have a mercator projection size (I know the grid isn't a mercator one, i'll update it next time I work on this). I've defined some areas better (the middle continent, which is called Meian is now an area rich in magic energy, the top left area is a bit red from all the active volcanoes and i've moved the deserts a bit. Also now the south pole is a smaller island that's surrounded by a big ice ring. This time I'm coming with a standard map and a political map (although I haven't started labeling things)

Political map

 

Standard map