WIP - Dvenic

[Tegutei]

Good evening, gentlemen, and welcome to another astounding installment of Looking At A Map That Some Guy Posted On The Internet!

Dvenic.jpg

This map covers an area roughly six hundred miles across - I say roughly because I still haven't quite decided on the scale. Still, it will be somewhere around there.
As you can see, there really isn't much there yet save for coastline.

Here is a rough map of the elevations:

Dvenic Mountains.jpg

Yep, I'm gonna need some mountains.

[Freodin]

Nice start.

How are you going to do your mountains?

[Tegutei]

While I would like to try my hand at drawing the mountains myself sometime, I have neither the tools nor skill to do so currently. Thus, brushes it is.

Dvenic Mountains.jpg

This is my current progress, using the brushes from Ramah's maps. Honestly, I'm not completely sold on this approach. The mountains don't really seem to form a proper range yet, it more just looks like a pile of pointy bits. I'm hoping it will look better once I get the hills and forests in more carefully. Also, looking at it now, I'm seeing that the large and small mountains are fairly evenly mixed - maybe if I move the larger ones into the center of the range?

The forests as they currently stand are very much not final, and I only have them on to see how the trees go with the rest of the map. They need to be quite a bit less dense and more carefully placed, but I'll work on that more after I get the mountains and hills down.

I also need to see about getting some rivers in sometime.

[Tegutei]

Okay, confession time - I completely forgot about this map until a few days ago. Today I sat down and spent my evening getting it done. I'm using Tetrajak's (lovely) brushes from his Irshy map now. There's probably a lot more I could say about this right now, but I really should get off to bed.

So here's the map.

dvenic.jpg

[Freodin]

There's a few things that you could improve on in my opinion.

First, when you use brushes, you need to be very careful with overlappings. You've got quite some areas where mountains and trees overlap.
Second, I think your rivers are a little to straight. Especially the Dorova River looks more like railroad tracks than a river.

But for the overall effect... the sound you heard was my jaw hitting the floor! Holy moley, what a nice map! The idea with the labels alone... impressive!

[Tegutei]

Yeah, there's definitely a number of spots where I didn't clean up the trees enough there. I think you're right that the Durova needs a few more curves, too.
Anyway, thanks for the feedback!

[Morgan]

I love the overall impression. Yes, perhaps there are some small imperfections, but the style is awesome!

[Lukc]

I think it looks fantastic and personally I don't even mind the straight river - yes, it could be curlier, but the map is abstract and as a quick representation of things, it looks great.

[Joshua]

At first I felt the same about the straightness of Dorova River, but then I looked again and I noticed the awesome creases you added into the map! And suddenly instead, I got the feeling of a representative, personally drawn adventurer's map and I fell in love. Seriously, I know I'm new to this and to this forum, but this is one of my favorite maps here already. There are a lot of things that help with that, but oh my god, the creases. I want to go there, and I want this map as my reference.

[Tegutei]

Okay, here's an update:
dvenic.jpg


Aside from reshaping the Dorova, I added a backing to the trees so they are no longer transparent so they can go in front of things without making a mess of themselves.
The creases were fun to do; what I ended up doing was taking this and overlaying it on the map, then rotating it 90 degrees and did it again. The main trick there is just playing around with the blending modes and opacity.