The Continent of Ictaria - topographic map

[Meton]

I love the way you've drawn the topography! It's visually very pleasing as well as realistic and works beautifully together with the colours. The labeling is also top notch. Amazing, beautiful map!

[Ilanthar]

Gorgeous map! I really love the way the colours and the topography and lands works together.

[Caenwyr]

A bit late, but thanks for all your kind words, people!

[rbnvgl]

Wow, this is just awesome.
Which method did you use to paint the mountains if I may ask? The relief style in photoshop with some opacity?

[Caenwyr]

Wow, this is just awesome.
Which method did you use to paint the mountains if I may ask? The relief style in photoshop with some opacity?

Thanks for asking, rbnvgl! I was asked this question before so I'll copy my answer from Reddit, with some tweaks if necessary.

Basically I drew the terrain by hand, eroded it, bumpshaded it and then overlayed a series of partially masked gradient maps each corresponding to a climate. In a little more detail:

So I first created contour lines in Photoshop: 16 layers each filed with a different shade of grey (from pitch black to stark white). Then on each layer I masked out all of the areas that had the same elevation: black for the oceans, white for the tippytops of the mountains, and the different grey tones for the elevation in between. All of this based on a bunch of sketches of course.


I then opened this stepped elevation file in Wilbur (it's a free programme that erodes elevation files) and fiddled with the settings until I had exactly the amount of erosion I wanted. This gave me a true DEM file (digital Elevation Model), the holy grail in this mapping business.


Then I opened this file in Photoshop again. I created a new layer filled with 50% grey, and applied a bump shading to it based on my DEM. I selected the DEM layer and put a gradient map on top. The idea of such a gradient map is that you map shades of grey to different colours. In this case the darkest greys, the lowlands, would become dark greens (at least in temperate climates), and the brightest colours would become beige (the mountains). In fact I created four different gradient maps, each for a different climate: temperate climates, cold climates, deserts and jungles. I then masked out the four gradient maps so they would only be visible in the correct climate zones. Finally I selected the top layer again, set the layer to "overlay", et voilà, that's your backdrop.


Then I drew a crapton of borders with Photoshop's shapes tool, created a tiny circle with a white fill with the oval tool and copied that a bazillion times for all of the different cities. Then I added all the text labels, the frame and the graticule, and there you have it!


So yeah, I did all of the work on screen, mostly in Photoshop with one stage in Wilbur. But the general layout of the place was based on a whole series of older maps, that ultimately began with a crappy first attempt in highschool on a spare piece of paper. All in all it was 20 years in the making, and I can't promise this will be the last iteration. This world is quite demanding!