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The general style looks fantastic, but to me the islands look a bit too uniformly round and blobby (technical term) - I'm not sure if it was intentional, but they somehow don't look right.
Okay... so I started a better job (better paying, but the company has more restrictive web policies and an aggressive website blocker) and then a week and a half ago I got married, which means for the past month or two I've been virtually incommunicado, especially with regards to leisure activities like this.
I'm still likely to be low on the radar for a while (I start evening grad classes in a couple weeks), but I'll try to post updates every once in a while as I work on this map. I just wanted to show everyone the (limited) progress I've made so far. (I wish I had more time to work on this, but life has other demands as the moment.) My previous posts have had some reduced size images (about 50% of full size), and I tried to upload a full-size image here, but even though it's only about 1460K JPG, the system won't upload it, so here's a 75% image.
So far, no forests, mountains or other features (I know where the mountains are going, which is what gives me the ability to draw in the rivers at this stage).
World Map 02-draft v1-4-Current.jpg
There's still a chance I'll want to work more on the coastlines to get them more interesting looking, or try to add in more barrier islands (adding barrier islands is a lot easier said than done!). Let me know what you think!
I think, therefore I am a nerd.
Cogito, ergo sum nerdem.
Check out my blog: "The Undiscovered Author"
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Pimping my worldmap here. Still WIP... long way to go, but I'm pretty proud of what I've done so far...
The general style looks fantastic, but to me the islands look a bit too uniformly round and blobby (technical term) - I'm not sure if it was intentional, but they somehow don't look right.
@Ravs: blobby? ...need to add that to the WIKI for geographic terms
Seriously tho, I agree with Ravells, love the style...not so hot on the islands being so uniform in shape. If you're stuck on what to do for the archipelago's look at some real world ones, the Philippines is a great example. Might stir up some ideas.
...and congrats on getting married!
My Finished Maps | My Challenge Maps | Still poking around occasionally...
Unless otherwise stated by me in the post, all work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
Yes, I realized that as I created them, and have tried to do some things to correct for that, but I thought not enough.Originally Posted by ravells
The source of the uniformly round and blobbiness is the method I used to sketch in the initial basic outlines: I used a round brush with a medium jitter setting. Bigger brush for bigger islands smaller brush for smaller islands. In some cases it worked, in many others it did not--particularly the large islands. I'll have to go back and rework some of them.
Any particular suggestions on where on the map this is most offensive (i.e. areas you think I should focus on first)?
I'll take a look, thanks.@Ravs: blobby? ...need to add that to the WIKI for geographic terms
Seriously tho, I agree with Ravells, love the style...not so hot on the islands being so uniform in shape. If you're stuck on what to do for the archipelago's look at some real world ones, the Philippines is a great example. Might stir up some ideas.
...and congrats on getting married!
And thanks! It's been a very exciting time for me... the only drawback being I don't get to work on these things like my maps quite so much.
I think, therefore I am a nerd.
Cogito, ergo sum nerdem.
Check out my blog: "The Undiscovered Author"
It's the story of a writer... follow me in my simple quest to get published, and share your own writing stories, adventures and writerly tips.
Pimping my worldmap here. Still WIP... long way to go, but I'm pretty proud of what I've done so far...
Okay... tried to fancy up the islands and whatnot. Most of the major landmasses retain their shapes as-is. I also added a series of tiny islands along the southern edge of the map. There are no major land-masses (at least nothing of a size worth mapping) beneath the polar caps, but these islands stand as the southern sentinels of the arctic ice.
Unfortunately... my time is so thin these days, that I've made only minor progress.
Here is a black-and-white of what I've done so far. Black ocean, white land. I'll be colorizing this and making it look like what I've posted before as I get time, which will probably be taking place over the next tree or four weeks.
I already have my first midterms of grad school in about three weeks, so we'll see what that does to my time.
P.S., this is still only at 75% of actual size, due to my having trouble uploading anything larger--although the full-size file is well under the 4MB size limit, I still get errors when I try to upload. I think my connection is just so slow that it's timing out before finishing the upload, but it could be something else.
I think, therefore I am a nerd.
Cogito, ergo sum nerdem.
Check out my blog: "The Undiscovered Author"
It's the story of a writer... follow me in my simple quest to get published, and share your own writing stories, adventures and writerly tips.
Pimping my worldmap here. Still WIP... long way to go, but I'm pretty proud of what I've done so far...
Holy smokes that looks good. I'd lose my mind putting in all of those rivers. Nice job.
If the radiance of a thousand suns was to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...I am become Death, the Shatterer of worlds.
-J. Robert Oppenheimer (father of the atom bomb) alluding to The Bhagavad Gita (Chapter 11, Verse 32)
My Maps ~ My Brushes ~ My Tutorials ~ My Challenge Maps
Thanks... I'm not sure, but I may have lost mine. Of course that's only the major rivers showing (small rivers, streams, and wadis aren't going to show on a world-map), and they're not to scale (with the full-size image being 7300 pixels wide, there's a little over 3-miles per pixel, making some of those rivers appear to be something on the order of 50-70 miles across at their widest points).
What was frustrating was that I had drawn in the major rivers of the continent of primary interest to me (the north-western one) before I discovered a slightly better and easier method that produced somewhat nicer-looking results.
I think, therefore I am a nerd.
Cogito, ergo sum nerdem.
Check out my blog: "The Undiscovered Author"
It's the story of a writer... follow me in my simple quest to get published, and share your own writing stories, adventures and writerly tips.
Pimping my worldmap here. Still WIP... long way to go, but I'm pretty proud of what I've done so far...
You'd lose your mind, and my eyeballs would jump out of my head and disappear in tiny puffs of flame.
Looking forward to see where this goes Karro.
My Finished Maps | My Challenge Maps | Still poking around occasionally...
Unless otherwise stated by me in the post, all work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
...from the still not yet posted FAQ on images (I really gotta get on that...)
-Rob A>Limitations
Unfortunately, there are also a couple of limitations. The first is file sizes. The following is a list of the file size limits:
bmp - 7.63 MB
gif - 7.63 MB
jpg - 4.77 MB
png - 4.77 MB
The second limit is the actual image size. The image must be less than 30 megapixels in actual size. If you try to upload a 6000x6000 jpeg that has a file size of only 1MB, it will fail (sometimes with a blank screen, sometimes with a database error depending on the actual size...) as it is 36 megapixels. This limitation is being worked on, and will hopefully be resolved soon.
To show of images larger than this, you will have to use an off-site image hosting service and provide a link.
My tutorials: Using GIMP to Create an Artistic Regional Map ~ All My Tutorials
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My Maps: Finished Maps ~ Challenge Entries ~ My Portfolio: www.cartocopia.com
Ahh.... that explains it. I knew about the 4MB file size restriction, but I did not know about the Pixel-size restriction. I do believe that must be what's causing the failure.
I think, therefore I am a nerd.
Cogito, ergo sum nerdem.
Check out my blog: "The Undiscovered Author"
It's the story of a writer... follow me in my simple quest to get published, and share your own writing stories, adventures and writerly tips.
Pimping my worldmap here. Still WIP... long way to go, but I'm pretty proud of what I've done so far...
