Hand drawn style?

[ravells]

I'm shooting for a hand drawn style here using Wag's lovely mountain symbols...does it work? (Still playing with the style) C&Cs welcomed. The full size of the map is huge, about 6 or 7 times what is shown but I've just cropped the area I'm working on at the moment.

Should I reverse the glow? Does the sea look like it should be land and vice-versa?

ta

Ravs

[Coyotemax]

I recall on the first map I posted, I had about 12 comments in a row commenting about the shading being on the landward side, so expect a few comments, I suspect

That having been said, it does look like it's coming along nicely, and I think the mountain symbols work well. I like the forests, and the font is particularly luvverly

[Jykke]

I think you should add something to the water to indicate it's water, maybe waves or something like that.. because the land-water effect can pretty much go either way at the moment, gradient inversed or not. What I noticed about the coastlines.. that the roughness difference is huge compared to the symbols used here. It might be a closeup from the original map, but this might be something to work on at some point of the map creation process. Other than that I think it's coming together very nicely.

[ravells]

Thanks guys, it might be time for the old woodcut sea effect.

The background has been done in raster and imported into Vector for the mountains, labelling - pretty much everything else. I think I'm going to have to increase the resolution of the raster image to get rid of that horrible jaggy coastline effect.

Thanks chaps!

[Steel General]

You could always post up versions done both ways and let people vote/comment on which they think is better.

[Midgardsormr]

Yes, you definitely need to address the resolution.

To me, it looks a bit as though the land is "bubbled" up above the water. Like there's a very steep but rounded slope going down to the water all the way around. It looks more like a bevel than an edge gradient, really. It's hard to say what you need to do with it, or even if it's really a problem, without seeing the smoothed version.

Suffice to say, I read the land as land in this map. So far, at least.

[Karro]

My thoughts are already covered above. Good start, though.

[ravells]

Think I've solved the resolution problem...sort of kind of. Is the style working? Does it look coherent?

That bubbly problem with the land was an inner glow which I've now made much more blurry which I think has got rid of it. I think I'm now happy that the sea looks like the sea although I may test with a wood cut sea thingy later.

As you can see the full size image is a bit big, but I'm having fun with the symbols (my crappy drawing skills permitting).

[pasis]

In my eyes it still looks a bit like the land and sea have switched places. I think its due to the colors used. You have done so many great maps that I’m sure you’ll make it right.
I like the mountains and that there are enough variations to break possible repetitiveness (is that a word?). I’m also glad that your trees are small enough as it makes the mountains look more…well…like mountains.
Great start and by looking on the size of it you don't have to worry about what to do on you free time

[Jykke]

The overall style looks quite nice actually.

What if you resolved the roughness issue by resizing the land layer to 2x it's current size, add gaussian blur with 7-8px blur (if it's on transparent layer, merge it with a complete white layer), adjust exposure to around +(2-3), offset (same place as exposure) to around -0.5, adjust the rest blurryness to reasonable level with curves (output 0, input 200), select color range (land layer color) and adjust fuzziness so that all land gets selected, inverse and delete the white part out. Resize back to normal.. and you should have a sharp coastline. Downside is that you might lose some minor detail with the technique. OR, you could just leave it as it is