New to mapping, looking to learn and improve!

[Aaron215]

Hey folks! Glad to see this forum is active, it seems like a great place.

I've done almost nothing like this before, other than little sketches in notebooks while bored in school, but that was a very long time ago. The past 6 months or so I've been vaguely interested in it after the DM in my D&D group posted their map and I started filling in information about towns and people in them and notable places etc, and in the past week I've jumped in with both feet and just started trying out various tutorials to see what was possible for making my own. I'm using Photoshop Elements 7, so I don't have everything these Photoshop tutorials have, but I try and make do. I also have GIMP, but I haven't tried it for this yet.

I've started making a map a day for as long as I can, and not going super in depth on them, just throwing stuff out and seeing what works. The first day I just used a program to generate it, then edited some stuff and got frustrated with how I couldn't edit things easily because I was working off a flat image.

Then I followed this tutorial https://imgur.com/gallery/mU9M6 and this tutorial: http://worldbuildingschool.com/how-t...ing-photoshop/ And made this: http://imgur.com/a/DgFKh

I kind of got hung up trying to make areas of more/less rainfall, varied temperatures, and thinking a lot about where it made sense to have mountains/rivers/foliage. Went to bed late

Next day I made this, which may end up being my big project, and I'll just do a island a day or something: http://imgur.com/evWkJmA

And today I just made this in about 30 minutes, and watched videos and read stuff about mapping and labeling maps: http://imgur.com/a/3s7Dl

So I'm thinking now that I can get a randomized map outline generated really fast and can make it look decent, I'm gonna work on that archipelago map and really flesh it out. Take parts of it and detail it to the brim, and give it history and... well just content. I imagine for a D&D campaign, or maybe multiple ones.

I'm happy with constructive criticism on what you see in these, advice on where to go to learn more and I'm interested in finding a place to post updates each day on the parts of the map I've added to. I feel like if I get in the habit of daily updates, I can keep at it

Thanks for having such a great resource here. I look forward to picking your brains!

[ChickPea]

Hi Aaron, and welcome to the Guild. You've already managed to produce some decent looking maps and it's going to fun taking them further!

We've got a whole area dedicated to tutorials here. There are downloadable PDFs in this thread, and also check out this comment as a starting point. I will say that probably most of the tutorials are for the full version of Photoshop, or for Gimp, and I'm not certain how they'll work in Photoshop Elements. I suppose you can read through a couple and see what you think. Or, just use Gimp.

You mentioned labelling in your comment. Around here, the PDF in this comment is pretty much considered 'the bible' of map labelling, so you might enjoy reading through that.

As for a place to post your maps, we have two main areas. The first is the 'Work-in-progress' area. I think you'd be best creating a thread in the World/Regional mapping area. You can post updates as you develop your map for advice and critique. There are instructions here on how to upload images at the Guild (you'll generally get more feedback on an image hosted here than you will for an external link). When your map is complete, post it in Finished Maps.

I hope that's enough info to introduce you to the Guild, but if you'd like help with something specific, don't hesitate to ask.