Helevos: the Anrel Isles

[ChickPea]

Like the new version much better. It looks great.

[Robulous]

Here goes another draft version - tidied up the bottom text tho still needs some work, and added an antique aged effect. I played around with the colours but I think this is what looks best, and it's also consistent with my previous atlas-style maps.

anrelvB3.png

[Deoridhe]

Are you still trying to clearly distinguish between the plains and forests? I was thinking it could work with an inverted color scheme for the forests, to set them apart and visually reinforce the opposing metaphor.

The layout of your text is night and day from the originals! Neat to see how much moving those things around can change the flow of a map.

[The_Sleeping_Dragon]

Truly brilliant: has style, clarity, good choice of text, and instantly eye catching. It is fantasy mapping looking like genuine cartography.

I endorse Deoridhe's wise comment and perhaps you need to darken the forests or create them as lots of trees where the dark outline of the trees will give you distinction from the green background but at present some of your woodlands fade into the background. The same problem will exist with beaches and deserts in the yellow background but then I am not sure you have created beaches and cliff faces on your coastline unless the light blue horseshoe at the bottom left perhaps? and could see no deserts

[Robulous]

Update! I've darkened the forest area so it's a bit more noticeable. There are tidal marsh/swamp areas (the blue-green parts), and plains in the south but no actual deserts. It's intended to be more of a political map but the forest area is important since in my world "virid" forest is an alien environment, poisonous to humans and mammals.

I've finished the bottom text and done some general tinkering. Otherwise it's close to done, or as much done as I have time for. This has been a particularly tough one to get right!

anrelvB4.png

[Deoridhe]

The forest darkening definitely helps set them apart! It looks awesome.

[davoush]

I really like this - the style is wonderful, artistic and clear. I was wondering how you managed to get the border lines (inner and outer) to look 'aged'? Are they hand drawn?

[- JO -]

I think it is a great success of a card that is political AND physical .. You knew how to mix genres!

[Pixie]

I really like this map. The layout is great and so is the choice of colors.
Two things I think could be improved:

- the font size is too varied, from the tiny latitude/longitude on graticule to the names of the regions goes too much of a difference. At least to my eyes...

- the use of outer grow on the labels is the lazy man's solution, and in your map it shows how poor of a solution it is, because it hides the texture. Instead, why don't you try using layer masks?..

[Naima]

This is modern reworking of a map I first drew for gaming when I was about 12 - the start of my fantasy world of Helevos.

Historically Anrel was a mess of small polities and city states which collapsed in the Orphans War - a decades long conflict, so called because it was fought by a generation of soldiers who'd only known war, and whose own parents were dead from the conflict. The islands' greatest cities were destroyed in the war, so the landscape is littered with ruins, particularly around the border, where an demilitarised zone still demarcates the uneasy peace.

Comments helpful - this is an important map for me so I'm keen to get it right. It's tough getting a balance between detail (there are potentially lot of names and places) and showing the overall picture.

Its important for me to show the forests. Helevos has two ecosystems, the "green" landscape of farmland, fruit trees and grass, and the "virid" weed of poisonous vines and monstrous trees, incompatible with human life.

Attachment 84353

Awesome little map and very nice colors, My sugestion would be to break the coastlines, that in this enlargment map looks too much continental , I mean the coasts look too smooth and regular considering it features also a mountanous zone and a lot of hills and fluvial erosion , I woudl break the shapes a little and adding some inlets and little deltas for some rivers according to the surrounding terrain if shoudl it be a flat plain or a rocky area. Also what programs did you use ? In case you had a little pass of fluvial erosion with wilbur or world machine would benefit also the breakup of the terrain , other than that excellent job.