Dunderhill Island Map

[Alfar]

Your map is pleasing to the eye and I think you have a good knack for this. I think the mountain style is a bit odd though. We don't have any mountains here in Florida, yet I find your mountains strangely familiar.

Come to think of it, that may in part explain my trouble with mountains - we don't have any mountains here in Denmark either!

I agree, very nice. Don't take this the wrong way but I'd throw out the swamps and forests...don't really need them. The mountains still need some work but I don't know enough about Gimp to help ya.

Yeah, the swamp blotch isn't really working... maybe use symbols?

and I guess the trees are way too big compared to the mountains and all, even tough they're just representations. I wasn't too happy with the first kind of forest I got (the first two iterations), so I figured I'd at least try this out. I do want to show the forest being there somehow... Ah well, all in the name of learning

Those rivers are stupid awesome, how'd you go about putting those together?

Umm, yeah. Wilbur helped me with those. Pretty much just followed the first tutorial for Wilbur, and fiddled with the values until I got something I liked. Then saved to a bump map png imported as layer in Gimp, inverted and thresholded it so only the rivers were visible. Then I added that to my water layer mask, made a selection from the mask and stroked the selection with a single pixel in a new transparent layer and adjusted opacity so it wasn't too hard on the eye.

[Ascension]

Could you show us a version without trees and mtns? I'd like to see the basic terrain, it looks pretty nice.

[Alfar]

Sure thing - here goes!

[Sigurd]

Wow - you're proving that simple is beautiful.

In your shoes, I'd consider subtle mods to that basic continent. The illusion of depth and the basic texture are very successful.

I might clean out the little dots inside of the rivers.


Sigurd

[Ascension]

I'm with ya Siggie, that's why I wanted to see this version. I also agree about cleaning up the rivers. Good stuff man.

[Alfar]

Thanks - I guess. I still want to make the mountains more mountain'y, so I guess I'll go over a couple more tutorials.

Maybe the problem is that I already have so much depth in the base that when I follow the tutorials, I'm trying to stack a mountain on top of a tall hill instead of a flat bit of land as was intended?

Btw Ascension, I have some experience with Photoshop, so feel free to make suggestions based on that. Most of the time, there's something similar available to the Gimp... I'm simply too cheap to buy myself a copy of PS.

Will look into cleaning up the river dots. What's a better strategy here: remove them or connect them? Bit of both? Some of the dots also provide for a more fractal-like coastline, so not sure what to do about those.

[Ascension]

You might want to look at Pasis' tut on mountains:

http://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=4405

You might be able to bring some of that over in to Gimp. The thing about the rivers, to me, is that they're too fat and short, rather stocky looking. If you added more land to these areas you could thin them down and make them look longer. Just my opinion and it's your map so take it for what it's worth.

[Alfar]

Gaaah!

Oh, sorry about that, getting slightly frustrated with my lack of ability here. So much input to parse. I can see what you mean about the rivers being too fat, and I guess it'd be nice if they'd start further up in the mountains... not sure about that, though.

I did manage to do something that I think could eventually resemble the tutorial you mentioned, but the Gimp severely lacks layer effects, so there's this whole manual process involved (copy layer, make a bump map that matches the layer mask, applying that bump map, delete layer copy and start over if you want to change the layer mask - best I could find so far ) - And nothing to show for it for now... bleh.

[Alfar]

Well, it's still Dunderhill island, but I figured I'd try out the old parchment style.

I know, the mountains are all the same (two by two), I only made one brush, but I made it myself, at least.

[Alecthar]

I like your parchment, but you did a Wrap Displace, rather than a Smear Displace, which is why you have odd bits of parchment sticking out from the sides of your canvas. I'd also activate Show Layer Mask and go over some of those floating bits of white with a black pencil to get rid of floating parchment.

I don't know if you're looking this far ahead, but I'd start thinking about what you're going to do to distinguish the land from the sea. This was a problem I had with my parchment style map, because it's easily possible to do too little or too much. Too little and it's difficult to distinguish in some ways, too much and your sea draws more attention from the eye than your landmass. I darkened my sea areas somewhat and added a gradient from the edge of my landmass into the sea. I've also got some sparse waves scattered around. If you've got cool clipart of ships or krakens or sea serpents or sea serpents/krakens eating ships, I imagine that would be pretty sweet.

I think I'm going to have to use RobA's Tapered River script to see if that doesn't give me something similar to what you've drawn there, that's pretty sweet.