Fantasy World Map

[Raptori]

If you are reconsidering those mountains, maybe you could add some more "tectonic" detail to that orogeny area. So, take the following if you like (if not, I had fun imagining it anyway, no worries).

- looking at you tectonic map, the plate on the right is a oceanic plate moving SW-ward, the one on the bottom is a partially oceanic plate with some significant land (maybe remnants of an old continent) at this end, moving northwards, and the plate on the right with the most of the land is mainly continental.
- now, to figure which goes under which you take into account plate density - generally speaking, old oceanic crust is denser, continental crust is "lighter"
- I would definitely make the part with the desert the less dense crust of the three, as that would fit my supposition that it is very old crust, this means the other two would sink under it
- this means the plateau would be in the deserted area (continent under continent generates plateaus - west USA or Tibet are the perfect examples)
- there would be significantly less land mass on the west plate (or, in other words, the mountain range gets shifted eastwards), as the oceanic crust sinks as it meets the continental crust.
- the shape of the triple junction would be basically given by the junction of the two continental plates, so figure the accurate border for these two and then add the oceanic one (there isn't really any location like this on Earth and I will try to explain why next)
- now, consider this is going on for a while (like millions of years, as always).. one of the continental plates is being pushed up, this means it will rise even further in the region, which in turns moves the border between that plate and the oceanic crust away from that triple point.
- over time I reckon this generates a "tongue" of up-moving plate breaking the triple point into two separate ridges, or at least, the tongue spreads as far as a point where two of the plates no longer collide head on but slide in opposite directions (transform faults)

I loved this bit of "what if", as I said, use it as you want it. I would get a bit of plasticine and try to figure it out. But feel free to ignore it

Thanks, that's awesome! I couldn't quite work out how the junction should work (like you said, nothing like it on Earth to compare to), so I'll be following this pretty closely

[Raptori]

Altering and then re-altering the colours is a pain when I can't use my tablet (must steal that back from my partner asap), so I've decided to make a smaller map focusing on one region to keep myself motivated, and maybe test a few techniques since I haven't actually really made a map yet. Style inspiration: Atlas Elyden (the Korachan one in particular) by vorropohaiah and Central Uralien by - Max - ...yeah I doubt I'll get it to look that good.

I used G.Projector to create a projection of the area I wanted to map (any better programs for that? the max file size is too low...), exported it both with and without graticules, then traced the coast and graticules in Illustrator. The graticules look wrong to me, and I was wondering if that's just my eyes being weird, or something actually wrong with the map. Feedback on that would be much appreciated!

I touched it up a bit in Photoshop so it's not just a bunch of lines, but it's naturally a bit rough at the moment since that's all that I've done so far

### Latest WIP ###
test-map.jpg

[Lingon]

That's cool! Interesting effect on the coastline, and I like the gray. And there are worse sources of inspiration

[Ilanthar]

Are you planning to change your entire world in this style? Or is it an additionnal map of a different kind? I'm just curious

It looks good anyway!

[- Max -]

Seems you're off to a good start. The effect on the coastline could be interesting though on some parts it looks a bit too dirty.

[Raptori]

That's cool! Interesting effect on the coastline, and I like the gray. And there are worse sources of inspiration

Thanks! I'm actually going to change it to a tan colour, since the paper they'd use would be hemp based.

Are you planning to change your entire world in this style? Or is it an additionnal map of a different kind? I'm just curious

It looks good anyway!

It's an additional map, this one is supposed to be in-world - one of the main characters' mother is a cartographer in the current outline, so it'd be one she made

The main map I've been working on so far is more to help me plan the history and to give me a better feel for the climate and biomes in different areas. I'm gonna make this new map first though since I've got some specific ideas for one of the civilisations in this area. I'll position the cities first, then the rivers, then the mountains, rather than the other way round. For the rest of the map I'd do it the right way round and then develop the cultures afterwards, but in this case I already know what I want to be there

Seems you're off to a good start. The effect on the coastline could be interesting though on some parts it looks a bit too dirty.

Funnily enough I had just been fixing that!


New version below, this time with a Lambert Conformal Conic projection, which fixes the main problem I had with the first version. I also changed the graticules to every 6 degrees, both because they look better that way and because the culture the map would be intended for uses a base 12 number system. The style is a little bit closer to where I want it - nicer coast both in terms of lines and effect, slightly improved paper texture, and colour closer to that of hemp paper. For some reason it looks bright yellow on my smaller monitor and completely desaturated greyscale on my main monitor. Might be a good idea to calibrate them somehow... which does it look like to everyone else?!

lambert-conformal-conic.jpg

Thanks for the comments, really appreciate the help!

[- Max -]

Looks good, though I'm not convinced by the poor quality of the background texture :/

[Raptori]

It's the highest resolution one I could find with the right kind of texture... any ideas where I could find a better one? Everything I've found so far is even smaller than that one

Ideally I'd want a HUGE texture image, since pixellated stuff really bugs the hell out of me.


Edit: found one that's big enough, but not as rough as I'd ideally want. The pixellation is gone, but it does look a bit oddly smooth to me :/
lambert-conformal-conic.jpg

[- Max -]

What size are you looking for?

[Raptori]

As big as possible to be honest, that particular map is A3 at 300dpi, so 4961 x 3508 pixels, but even bigger than that would be better (I like working at A1 size, so double that width and height for how big the perfect one for me would be)

I haven't done anything at print resolution on Photoshop for a loooong time, so I've lost all of my old image libraries, never transferred them from my old PC


Edit: just spent a little time messing around with Photoshop brushes to see what I could come up with for mountains, rivers and other stuff like deserts and swamps, and then added a couple of labels in too. Annoyingly, the font doesn't stay on one line properly when it's rotated, not sure what to do about that... maybe I'll have to do the labels in Illustrator/InDesign or something instead :/

style-test.jpg