WIP- Abelav

[Josiah VE]

Wow. I am quite fond of that, and sounds simple. Is the texture preloaded in Photoshop, or can I download it somewhere?

It doesn't come with photoshop. There are plenty of parchment textures on the internet, just search up "parchment texture" or something like that.
I'll link a few good ones here:
The particular one I used for it: http://coyotemax.deviantart.com/art/...es-4-144972405
https://www.cartographersguild.com/a...9&d=1256072213

[hireshmontvellos]

Okay, new draft. I've totally redone the water, I've tweaked the mountains, I've added some snow, I've changed the ground colors and texturing a bit, added a little more terrain diversity in a few places. And, of course, I've added a parchment texture, which I'm really digging. I also tidied up the coastlines quite a bit. We still have some scarping down into the coast, but less severe than before, and I've fixed the sharpest breaks in color near the coast where I had layering issues.

Now, a few thoughts/questions:

Does it seem too dark? I'd be game to lighten it up a little. The darkness looks good to me on one level, and should make it easier to see some lettering later on I hope, but, still. Kinda dark.

Does it seem too featureless? I toured the Smithsonian museum of natural history a few days back, and couldn't help thinking how remarkably bountiful and varied the world is, and wondered if my own setting would be varied enough to be interesting. I have only a few points that could even be slightly volcanic. I have no landscape like Iceland or Cappadocia, at least not yet. Certainly there are lots of places where I could place such a landscape on a smallish scale, and many of the world's strangest places are actually quite small geographically speaking, but still. Any thoughts on ways to make the space look more filled?

Of course, I know it will eventually look much more filled as I add in the numerous labels of cities, regions, geographic features, waterways, etc. And on that, I'll also solicit advice: anybody have thoughts on kinds of labels that look good with this sort of quasi-realistic map?

Geog Image 3.jpg

[hireshmontvellos]

Oh, also, I need a tutorial on a good compass-rose type thing, maybe map-lines, and a good weathered-looking map border. Any links to said tutorials or tips on good ways to do them would be appreciated.

[hireshmontvellos]

So I've gone ahead and added city markers. I've also got a city-size visualization map. I thought about bumping up the scale, but found that would require changing scale in later years from the initial year given the proximity of several large cities and my desire to avoid overlap.

FWIW, total population is 10-15 million, with 5-10% urban pop, pretty consistent with rates seen in Medieval Europe, as it is a Medieval-inspired setting.
CityMarker.jpgCitySizer.jpg

[hireshmontvellos]

Been working on this. Below are some more maps.

First, a map showing major geopolitical regions:
Region Labels.jpg

Next, progress on labelling/marking cities and places:
Locations Image.jpg

And here's a map showing drainage basins. Red areas drain via a single large river, uncolored areas represent drainage through various channels to a given body of water, blue represents an endorheic basin.
Drainage Basins.jpg

[hireshmontvellos]

Eyeballing it I recognize I probably need to vary font size more for geographic labels, and just need more such labels (I have many more, just not added yet). And I think the color is too colorful for the font for the region labels.

Also not happy with the region borders. I basically just drew lines; I welcome suggestions on how to make the region borders look better.

[hireshmontvellos]

And whoops, forgot to color in one of the drainage basins: the big basin just below the endorheic basin should be red, as it all drains out of one distribution area.

[Abu Lafia]

Oh, i somehow missed this thread. Also a belated welcome to the Guild! That's wonderful work so far hireshmontvellos I really like the landscape and the coloring looks just brilliant. Since you asked about the region borders: I'm no expert, but in some cases it'd seem more "natural" to me if the borders would follow a river, as they are following the mountain ridges already (in many cases the border sits directly in the middle of two rivers). The wrinkly shape of the borders itself looks totally fine to me.
The labeling of some cities looks a bit weird and could be improved in my view. Eduard Imhof's paper on "Positioning Names on Maps" is a good resource for these questions. The regional and geographic labels seem mostly well placed. Looking forward to see this unfold. Keep up the great work!


Edit: i overlooked some of your questions because i was in awe of your beautiful map
- Since you're heading here for a "quasi-realistic" map, i'd look for a more "simple" font. The unical(?) like font you used here, somehow doesn't fit the neat landscape in my view.

- I think your landscape doesn't look too featureless, and you're right the labels gonna fill a lot of the space already.

- For compasses and stuff there are a lot of tutorials out there. For example: arsheeshs Making Map Borders in Gimp (should be adaptable to PS) and for compass roses: Djekspeks great mini tut.

[hireshmontvellos]

So region borders and city placements share a tricky issue with relation to rivers.

It's standard in imaginary cartography to put cities at river deltas, and make rivers borders. But as I review the historic record, these both seem odd. Deltas tend to have fast-silting harbors, frequent flooding, and lots of swamps and disease, so make poor city sites, so I've tried to locate cities at nearby harbors (for example, like Alexandria was for the Nile), or else further up near logical heads of riparian navigation.

I bring that up for regional borders because the same thinking for setting cities at heads of navigation or accessible harbors also informs the question of riparian borders. In a premodern setting, water is by far the fastest, easiest mode of transportation. A riparian city will depend on its river for shipping, food, trade, even military access and deployment in some cases. So there's a strong incentive not to have rivers be borders but rather for rivers to be central highways.

Far from being a barrier to movement, rivers are an accelerant to it.

Historically, Europe has few major long-distance rivers that are good for continuous shipping like, say, the Nile, Yangtze, Ganges, or Mississippi are. Such navigable rivers as do exist have tended to exist far from major cities which, in Europe, are focused around narrow seas (North, Baltic, Mediterranean, etc). So these rivers that were of comparatively little use for travel became borders rather than their more natural function as focii of movement.

I've opted to have some places where rivers are borders, but more where rivers are centroids. River valleys or watershed regions tend to be areas with some commonality in cultural, social, and economic relations as they share transport networks linking them together via the river and any attendant valleys through rougher terrain. For example, in Appalachia where I'm from, it's not the rivers that divide hollers: their valleys make ideal transit routes! Rather, it's mountains. Likewise we see in pre-Columbian American plains areas, or in the Incan Andes, or in China, while rivers do sometimes form borders (as they did in Rome), they as often form highways.

I will read up on the name positioning--- that's a good resource! And thanks for the compass rose tutorial! Good tips!

[darcycardinal]

hireshmontvellos

Hello, these maps keep getting better and better. the labeling for the geopolitical areas looks like it could be a little tricky, i suppose you will need to test out a few fonts. Out of curiosity, do you have a rough scale for the map? I'm interested in the dimensions.

-darcycardinal