World Map WIP in GIMP

[Karro]

Well... so a couple weeks ago I lost my job, and the following week began the process of moving into a new house where eventually I will be living with my fiancee/wife. So... the past couple weeks I've been relatively incommunicado (sans internet ).

But I got a moment here on some borrowed wi-fi, and thought I'd take advantage of some of the learning on GIMP I've been doing and have another go at my world map.

Yeah, like roughly 50% of all readers of fantasy stories and novels, I'm in the process of writing just such a novel (have been for years). And like roughly 50% of those writing fantasy novels, I made my own map. Only recently, in an attempt to actually improve my writing, I restarted the whole thing from scratch, and consequently started mapping from scratch.

So here, using the early stages of RobA's GIMP tutorial for regional maps is an attempt at a world map (roughly mercator projection-ish). The sea and base land are from those early steps of the tutorial. The mountains, forests, jungles, deserts, and arctic tundras are just blobs of color thrown on to start getting a feel for it.

I started this map by trying to consider the underlying tectonics and the effects it would have on geography (this required me to move some continents around to fit the tectonics). The first map shows as a red line the tectonic boundaries with color-coded plate movements. The second is without the tectonics.

The gray blobs are mountains and hills. The green blobs are forests, while the gray-green blobs are rainforests and swamp/wetlands. The yellow-ish blobs are deserts, and the white-ish blobs are tundra and frozen arctic ice.

Sample World Map w Tectonics.jpg

Sample World Map wout Tects.jpg

The images are reduced in size by 50% from the originals, then you have the jpeg artifacts.

My current thoughts: I like how varied and interesting the north-western continent is. I'm not completely sure that the southern continents, in particular, have as much variety in coastline and appearance as perhaps they ought. I'm open to suggestions on improvements or thoughts. I tried to place the different zones in logical places (deserts on the leeward side of mountains or along the equator, rainforests along the tropics and in places with abundant rainfall, etc.), but I'm not 100% sure I got it all right. I'm guessing the leeward side of mountains are on the western side rather than the eastern side in the southern hemisphere, assuming the trade winds blow in the opposite direction down there (east-to-west instead of west-to-east).

Anyway... comments and critiques are most welcome.