Continent of the Kingom of the West and former Empire

[TheMarcus7]

This is a project where I'm teaching myself Photoshop while I create a map for the campaign I've been part of for the last twelve years. I'm using Tear's tutorial. I'm on hold while the GM goes through his notes to see if he has any info on the geography of the continent East of what's shown here:

tear_tutorial_w_cliff.jpg

I ran into a bit of a problem last night (documented here), but I think I've hit on a solution that works well. I'm using the lighting direction from Acension's tutorial.

[Ascension]

Not a lot to say other than so far so good.

[TheMarcus7]

Okay, well, I scrapped my original shape and started over (and yes, I know the continent looks like a turtle, I may still yet use the original shape), and I like the results better. I'm still using Tear's tutorial* and here are some stages.

Ocean
new_empire_ocean_copy.jpg
My map is pretty large, 3000x2000, so I've been increasing some of the values accordingly.

Elevations
new_empire_elevations_copy.jpg
The interesting bits that I put in this layer are the steppe area to the East. The escarpment in the West part is from an old map done by a former player.

Mountains and Lighting
new_empire_mountains_south_lite_plus_escarp_copy.jpg
I moved the lighting around to the SE, and did a lot more layering on the mountains, and I brought the escarpment back into play as its own layer, since the style is quite a bit different.

This is about four hours worth...

.TM7

[TheMarcus7]

After hacking my way (not terribly effectively) through several tutorials, I decided to give Ascension's Antique Map tutorial a go. I love his results. This is a project where I'm teaching myself how to use tools by mapping a game world thats been around twenty years or more, existing mostly in the mind of the GM and described to the players. Anyway, here is what I came up with:

Antique WM_w_labels.jpg

I drew the coastline by hand rather than use the clouds technique since I had part of the map already. The mountains use a 3px brush, with a fade of 10, 15 or 20 px. I used an interior shadow rather than interior glow style because I liked the way it looked better. When I showed it to my GM, he liked it but I got a lot of the dimensions and geographic features off, so I'll be giving up on this map and starting over, probably in a new style !

[Diamond]

That looks pretty darn good. I love Ascension's antique style; wish more folks would emulate it.

[TheMarcus7]

I was pretty happy with it until I looked at the Fantasy South America map and realized just how far I have to go... but I appreciate the thought. And I plan to keep at it.

.TM7

[euio]

For the cliff, I think you should use the same stuff you're using now for the mountains, but only do one side. Right now, the switch to isometric just for the cliff doesn't really fit.

Other than that, it's excellent!