Elosha

[Ascension]

I started this just to keep in practice but then it morphed into a full-fledged map and the next step in an evolution of style. I'm pretty happy with it and it has become my favorite map...until the next one. The help in the WIP section helped me to polish it off, also pushed me to do more than the initial messin around, so thanks, guys.

[Coyotemax]

Yeah. That's nice.

I especially like the little Pyramid icon in the desert

[mearrin69]

Holy smokes. That's awesome. The texturing is sublime but the icons and labeling really make it pop for me. Love the map titling as well. Beautiful stuff, as usual.
M

[alexandream]

Great map!

I can't form an opinion on the mountains, though: At a first glance I don't like the colour variation, even though I'm aware that this is one of the things that makes this interesting style so different... on the other hand, I *love* the height map on those mountains. I've been trying to get a good mountain range for almost two weeks now, and I've yet to see a mountain range bump mapping that is as realistic as this one.

Got any tips on how you came up with those mountains? It looks so nice that I can't help but think they were hand drawn

Summing it up, it's a very nice map, and there you'll have some rep for it

[Ascension]

Well I cover the basics in my atlas tut and continent tut but for the past few months I've been adding an additional step where I draw ridge lines and bevel that. This particular map has a bunch of artistic filters and touches thrown in for good measure, though. The fonts are: Metal Macabre for the title, Sanctuary for the nations, Jellyka End_less Voyage for the towns, and Jellyka Estrya's Handwriting for the forests and things like that. The lil icons I added to my brush thread here.

[Steel General]

The Ascendant One strikes again!

[euio]

That's such a beautiful style. The text looks amazing. I'm surprised that the mix of satellite & hand-drawn map elements so so good, but it really gives the map something extra above everything else.

I don't really like the mountains, though - while everything else looks crisp, they are fuzzy and hard to discern.

[Ramah]

Mountains always split opinion it seems. I actually really like the mountains on this one. Your maps have been drifting towards the heavily filtered, even impressionistic style of late, sometimes a little too much so for my taste, but this one walks the line with confidence.
As I said in the WIP, I love the little icons and they really seem to gel with the watercolour filtering.
The colour of the border, the sea, the rhumb lines... all suggest to me some influence from Tear, which is always a good thing in my opinion.
If I have to dig down and find one nitpick then I guess it would be that some of the country labels have parts of their lettering missing which makes them somewhat hard to read, but I suspect this is intentional.

Anyhoos, wonderful map, Ascension.

Edit: I'd rep you but I need to share it around some first.

[TheRedEpic]

This is an excellent map! i love the watercoloresque aspect of it, very interesting, especially with the shadows on the cities and such. A+!

[Gandwarf]

Very nice. Love the icons. Can't rep unfortunately.