World Map of Harmona WIP

[Seraphine_Harmonium]

I really like the step effect as the ground fades away under the water. That's my favorite part.

[Ascension]

If you want an actual railroad brush, I have one or I could tell you how to make one. Make a rectangle, about 3 or 4 times high as it is wide. This is the slat or crosspiece...the wooden thing. Then make the iron rail stick out a little bit from each side, top and bottom...enough so that there is enough space before the next slat comes into play. Save this as a brush then choose this brush as the active brush. In the brush editing menu, set the angle jitter to direction and save this as a new brush and delete the previous one. Now, using the pen tool, draw a path and then stroke the path with this brush. If you were doing a full realism thing you might want separate brushes for slats and for rails so that you could get wood textures onto the slats and iron gray color for the rails.

[jtougas]

I really like the colors you've chosen for this. Great work. Oh and Ascension the word your looking for is "ties".

[vman3force]

Thanks for the feedback guys. @ Ascension - I'll definitely try that technique out. Im not sold on the style im using right now, im still trying to decide how to best mesh the "information" elements with the more illustrative aspects. In general I want to stay more stylized than realistic with the markers.

[vman3force]

made changes to icons and roads, and began adding geographic notations.

[vman3force]

finished geographic notation:
-mountains
-forests
-rivers
-coastal features
-regions
-minor features

now, onto political notations. to avoid having it become too confusing, I kept the wording toned down for these first categories. the political notations will pop out more.

[vman3force]

Pretty much done labeling cities, placing outposts and lighthouses. Tedious work but good to have it out of the way.

Next i need to figure out how best to draw in the political borders... I want this element to be super subtle and not conflicting with the road and river lines. All this text is making the map pretty dense and i dont want to overwork it much more.

Then after that the map key and border and it'll be pretty much done.

[Sergei Zybin]

Great style, but roads looks little unrealistic - even today they never build like this.

[MSZ]

I like the colors very much. Remind me of an strategy game I played some years ago.
The mountains somehow don't fit with the rest of the map. The colors are ok but in my opinion the perspective does not match.

[vman3force]

Thanks for giving me some critical feedback guys.
In regards to the roads, you're probably right Sergei; if I were to re-examine them I'd probably change a few things about the layout. For the most part I drew them to follow the lay of the land - in the northern flatlands they run pretty straight and network the small farming and mining towns that populate the region, which may look rather artificial but those roads would have been more engineered than the roads in the more mountainous southern regions.
As for the mountain style; Ive been getting a lot of different kinds of feedback on that aspect. My decision to go with a more designed/flat look stemmed out of experimenting and the wish to avoid any conventional representation of mountains - isometric icons wouldnt have looked right and this map is too stylized for a more realistic approach to shading. MSZ, im not entirely sure what you mean by the perspective not matching, since the whole map is top down.

So, I finished off the last touches on the labeling and such, and added the compass rose and map key. I decided to just skip marking the principality borders because I never decided exactly how to make it mesh with the map. It's at about 90% completion, just going to try out a few different styles of frame.