January 2018 Challenge: The Isle of St. Jezebeth

[GreatWhiteNorth]

Last month I was so close to the golden compass I could taste it! So here I am trying for January's award. I began this map yesterday evening and the labels provided by Diamond fit (almost) perfectly onto the map shape I had drawn. I'll be adjusting the coastlines in a big way to account for the Gulf of Mathay, and in small areas to account for some others, but otherwise, I think it fits well.

Here's the background: I conceive of this map as the first in a two-part series. This map will be from the perspective of a colonizing power, renaming and co-opting a Pacific-esque island. Special thanks to Bill Hooks for the Victorian mountain brushes! (https://www.cartographersguild.com/s...zy+caterpillar)

The second map, which I will be producing at a later date, will be more illustrative, full color, from the perspective of the native islanders.

### Latest WIP ###
Isle of St Jezebeth (WIP 1, small).jpg

[Blaidd Drwg]

Off to a good start. Good luck!

[Diamond]

Glad to see someone besides me giving those brushes some love. Those are probably my favorite mountain brushes bar none.

Looking forward to seeing where you take this!

[Chashio]

Great start!

[Ilanthar]

Very nice start, indeed. I like a lot the land shape.

[Wired]

Already looking nice!

[GreatWhiteNorth]

So I've been a bit unsatisfied with the way my mountains are looking (mostly because I don't feel they're super intuitive). Here's my ### Latest WIP ### , where I've made notations of where I plan on changing mountain chains. Purple indicating where I want the mountains to go, pink x's where I'm going to remove them. The islands are volcanic in nature, formed from undersea eruptions as the plate moves across the sea. The yellow line indicates the general direction of travel, which means there will be a few major volcanoes alone that route, interspersed with valleys. So my question is to you the map viewer, how intuitive are the mountains as they stand now?

Isle of St Jezebeth (WIP 2, small) .jpg

[jshoer]

I like the style of the mountains a lot! Very old school. However, they are a bit incongruous with the idea of volcanic islands, which tend to build up in big shields rather than ridges. Maybe take a look at topographic maps of the Galapagos, or Hawaii, for some examples?

[GreatWhiteNorth]

Yeah, so I'm using a few maps as reference material, and I was looking at this map of Oahu, which does seem to have a few major ridges. I imagine the island as larger than Oahu, perhaps indicating that there was more time for morphological change? I very clearly am not much of a geologist.

3706000.jpg

[jshoer]

You have some leeway here - The older the island, the more time it gets eroded and degraded, which can happen very asymmetrically.

For example, the Galapagos islands are newer/smaller than Hawaii, and the major islands are all very shield-y. You can even see on this relief map how the newer islands (in the west) are much more regular in appearance than the older islands to the east.

You're also right that Hawaii consists of bigger islands, which leaves much more room for irregularity.

You can go whichever direction you want, I just wanted to get you thinking!