Map of Harren - Trouble with adding text

[Christopher Powell]

Thanks for the kind words, Midgardsormr! I like the look of it, but I am a bit biased, so it is always nice to hear that others like it too.

Still working on adding text, but, I have a different update.

Found a nice tutorial about making forests and I didn't really like the forest I had created, so I thought I'd give it a whirl.

Here are two slightly different versions of my new forest:
darker forest.pnglighter forest.png

Thoughts? Which do you like better, the lighter or darker version?

Any suggestions on improving it/making it mesh more?

Also, yes, it is supposed to be red. It is a forest composed entirely of red trees.

You can't really tell but I've dialed the ocean back a bit as well. I think it looks much better to thanks for everyone on that advice.

[Zuni]

I love how the sand crinkles around the river! How did you do that?

[Midgardsormr]

I prefer the darker color, but I'm not wild about the texture. I think it clashes with the painted style around it. The solution might be as simple as blurring it a bit to match the softness of the surrounding hills.

[Christopher Powell]

Finally, an update!

So, something really terrible happened and my computer crashed in the middle of working on the map. The file was completely lost. Somewhat luckily, I had some previous versions that I had kept around but they were very outdated, so I had to do a lot of copy and pasting and reworking to basically get back to were I was when I last left you.

Anyway, I've added some forests, and I'm fairly happy with them, but I'm having trouble with a forest in the South-West known as the Frostwood. Given it's name, I kinda want to make it look like it is kind of covered in snow. Unfortunately I've only succeeded in making it look like it is covered in fog or some sort of haze.

Here it is without the fog:
MapForest.png

And here it is with the fog:
MapForestSnow.png

Any suggestions?

I love how the sand crinkles around the river! How did you do that?

I'm not very good with tutorials, but this is how I taught myself how to make it. (It's supposed to be a canyon, so, if you couldn't tell that maybe I need to rework it)

I copied a section of the Grand Canyon from Google maps (make sure to select the terrain option). Then I pasted it into it's own layer in Gimp. Underneath that layer I created a layer with the texture I was using for deserts.

Then, I desaturated the grand Canyon layer. Then, I set the layer's opacity to what looked good to me (I don't remember what level it was). I erased everything that I didn't want from the Grand Canyon layer, then I grabbed the airbrush tool, set it to black, and basically just tried to copy what was already there. After doing this for a while I managed to create some things that looked reasonably like canyons, and that is what you see on my map.

Hope that helps!

[Christopher Powell]

An even longer break between updates.

It's been a while, but I am finally back in the map game. This world is finally coming together and I had new ideas for how to make the map tie in with the story and give it a little more pop.

This border is experimental, so, I particularly welcome feedback on that aspect. I like the concept but I am not sure the vector graphics are blending that well with the bitmap image of the map.

Anyway, here it is:
BorderTestSmall.png

[Christopher Powell]

And here is an experiment with a more colorful version of the border.

BorderTestSmallColored2.png

[Jean-Abdel]

Your map is really cool ! I personally prefer the colored border