The Realm

[Martineagle]

Hellos

My second attempt at creating any kind of map and first time posting on the forum(properly atleast ). This map was made as a more realistic version of an outline done by my friend who a RP Forum, so I couldn't play around as much as I wanted to. As of right now I am stuck on how I could go about creating marshes and mountains. Dan's guide, I'm missing a gritty texture so I can't really use it, and RobA's mountains aren't looking too right.

Done in: Photoshop CS4 and GIMP
Tutorial help from: danPV's Creating Nameless Bolkenheim & RobA's Using GIMP to Create an Artistic Regional RPG Map

Any critique would be nice.

[Juggernaut1981]

#1 River violation (or possibly you just need to make it an island)... Down on the bottom peninsula you can't have a river going through there... it would be a body of sea-water.

#2 Your rivers appear to be "shadowed" by your forests. Not sure what you're doing with your layers, but the issue will be in there somewhere.

[Martineagle]

1) Alright, I'll try and either erase that river or seperate the land mass more. Thanks

2) For some odd reason, I'm have some trouble getting the rivers over the forest layer since the rivers and sea was never seperated. I've tried erasing the forest but it has no effect unless I'm using a bigger brush.

[Ascension]

You might want to fill in the whole continent and then draw the rivers on a new layer. Then you can use this new layer as a mask on the land layer so that the ocean shows through and you still have rivers that you can play with...turn down the opacity, put on a stroke or drop shadow, etc. The major river violation that you have is that rivers start in mountains and end up in the ocean...they don't start in the ocean and end up somewhere else in the ocean. Simple fixes so it shouldn't take too long. Nice colors and not too shabby overall.

[su_liam]

Loop River is the latest product of New Amsterdam Gravitics. Least expensive desalination process known to modern technology. All the best planets are installing them. Come on try to drag yourself into the 69th century, here!

[Saule]

I like your colours.
As for mountains, I usually experiment with brush settings (with the chalk brushes mostly), and creating a layer with bevel&emboss settings. I always try to pick a green/brown colour for the hills, a brown/grey colour for the mountains and a white colour for the tops, and I make them in seperate layers. Each layer gets a layer style (bevel & emboss), with settings on 'emboss' and 'soft chisel', and a texture (just browse for a 'stony' texture, you can find some links on the forum as well). At that point, it's just playing around with the settings 'till it looks good.
I know this isn't too specific, because I never do the same thing twice, but I hope it helps some. There are some great tutorials on the forum as well, you could try to find something there as well.

[Martineagle]

Alright thanks for the replies so far ^_^

@Ascension: Thanks for the ,I guess, rule I'm not exactly a geographic student nor have I spend as much time looking into actual landmasses as i should have. I'll see if I can move the rivers onto a separate layer.

@Saule: Thanks for the mountain ideas. I'll check out the forum to see if i can find a stony texture or something suffice.