First (serious) attempt at map-making (PS CS6)

[Dörne]

@Pixie - Obrigado pelas dicas! Estive a trabalhar um bocado com as tuas sugestôes...


12 - I did some work based on a few suggestions from Pixie. I'm not particularly happy with the North, but I did some work on the Eastern side as well as the overall grass/green bits. For the shore I simply extended the forest I previously had and afterwards applied a slightly darker green layer with Blending Mode set to Overlay on top of the existing grass layer. This made the colour a bit darker to better represent the wetlands.
Next step is to turn the North into a good looking piece!

HHY6LD5.jpg


13 - Before I take any further step I decided to make a believable scale for my map. I overlayed it on top of a planisphere to figure out how big I want my map to be. This should help me label since I now have a reference of where to place cities and etc..


9f68f6b7fcc02902dfbaf85b0d041a70.png

[Pixie]

13 - Before I take any further step I decided to make a believable scale for my map. I overlayed it on top of a planisphere to figure out how big I want my map to be. This should help me label since I now have a reference of where to place cities and etc..

Excellent idea!!

The colors are better, in my opinion - but you can still go for more variation. Here's a hint... superimpose your landshape on the east coast of China/Vietnam - you'll see that the climates you find over there don't fit your coloring anymore.
(You are always free to ignore my ramblings about climate authenticity - there's no Climate Police over here)

[arsheesh]

This is coming along very nicely. The colors are great.

[Dörne]

@arsheesh - Thank you! My issues with colours are quickly falling down thanks to you guys

@Pixie - That's not a bad idea! I'l get to it eventually...

So, feeling intense frustration with how laggy PS is when editing my map, I decided to take a break from this terrain map. (This doesn't mean I'l quit it, It just means I'd rather halt work on it before I fall to the depths of despair and end up quitting it forever)
However, I can't seem to let it go!

14 - Here's my take on an old timey parchment map. I planned on doing this after the terrain map, but due to technical issues (Including PS crashing if I try to edit the existing layers) I've decided it'l spare my mind if I do the labels on this version here and then transfer them over to the terrain map!
This one's a piece of work:
First I applied a parchment image to the back of it and to the front. The front texture got a clipping mask to cover the land mask. Then one in the back got a Color Overlay of black set to 15%. Secondly, I made a new layer on top of the Sea Parchment layer, that I filled with a Pattern Overlay of some japanese-style waves I had laying around. I added a Color Overlay to the "Waves" layer with mode set to Color and gave it a very low saturation colour, so as not to meddle with the overall low-sat style of the parchment map.
Now that the basics were out of the way I made those coastal lines. First, I created 3 layers beneath the Land Mask layer. I called them Inner, Middle and Outer (one for each line. On the Inner layer I expanded Land Mask selection by 5px, and filled with white. I did this to the Middle layer, but instead used the Inner layer selection, expanding upon it 5px yet again. Same goes for Outer. I set fill of all these layers to 0% and added a Stroke layer style. Inner has 75% Opacity, Middle has 50% Opacity and Outer has 25% Opacity. Merged all 3 layers after rasterising layer styles. Then I added a "Outer Glow" layer style of light blue at 25% Opacity.
I threw in some compass roses, some Celtic patterns and a Heraldic lion I found on google.
Phew!

fiIENxX.jpg


15 - Edit, added some lines and compasses, removed some ugly low res things and added text.

WKXPPAr.jpg

[Ilanthar]

It's looking very good and certainly worth the efforts!

[miltiadesXO]

Great work! Coming along nice