[WIP] Untitled World Map

[DerWille]

This map is going to be for a D&D game I'm running. I haven't tried to name it yet, that's the least important thing. The game is a dark gothic fantasy set in a cold world (Not freezing, just cold) that revolves around big battles with the finale of killing a god. I wanted the map to reflect that as well.

I've just put up the first rendition of the mountains using ironmetal250's excellent tutorial (Great map by the way). However, since I don't have a scanner to scan any of my drawn art I had to improvise then realize that trying to shadow in GIMP is not a good idea. So I went with a more... vector style maybe? Does this clash with a dark gothic style? Also what color should I make these mountains? I tried some grays and they were hard to see, but black doesn't seem quite right.

Here's what I've got so far.

[philipstephen]

Looks great... but i am betting some folks will be giving you some advice on the rivers... which tend to flow together from high elevation to low and have one exit point to the sea per river system... rather than branch to form multiple exit points to the ocean...

as for colour of the mountains, i think black for the lines as you have them... but if you can put a grey or brown tone underneath it, to replace the green, that might help them stand out from the land around them...

[Gandwarf]

Welcome! Because you posted your first map have some rep

I like the landmass, but I agree with philipstephen.

Some critique:
- The rivers don't look natural (which is fine of course if you have a good reason for that, it's your world!).
- The mountains need some other color to make them stand out more. You might also want to place them a bit closer together.
- The green you used for the landmass is pretty dark. You might want to experiment with toning it down a bit. This might also bring out the shapes of the mountains more.

Anyway, I can't stress enough I like the landmass and islands. It should be a place to have fun in.

[DerWille]

Thank you for the advice. However, I just noticed something. I'm not able to save the difference in colors because of the alpha channel. The water is suppose to be a lot darker. I've tried .jpeg and .png and neither have worked. Do you know what does?

I tried to place the mountains so that the rivers flow down from the mountains, but they're going to be really hard to change without starting over again. I've sort of... you know, pasted the two together... heheh... big mistake.

[Gandwarf]

My skills with the Gimp are insufficient to help you, but someone here sure can and will.

And I have made the mistake to paste everything together as well... and regretted it. Ah well

[ironmetal250]

I like the unique shape of your landmass, and all the islands.
As stated before, a lot of the rivers do not look natural (you shouldn't have one running through the entire continental mass), since your map is small, you could try using difference clouds to generate a height field and running calculations to find where the rivers should flow in Wilbur (following the steps in one of the tutorials, I forget which one, should get you a black map with all of your rivers in grey/white), and then you can overlay that in GIMP over your map and either keep those rivers or trace over the ones you like stylistically.
The mountains, especially your big mountian brush, look a little bit square and flat on the bottom instead of based off of the natural cylindrical shape of the mountains you've drawn (think three dimensional when you're drawing them - in your picture light is coming from the direct left so there will be shading to the right behind any ridge of rock).

The scale of the mountains is also a bit to big for the continent, in my opinion... it might help if you made the map larger (a good technique is to scale it larger, use a gaussian blur of 1-2 pixels, and run a threshold filter to get the solid edges back again... this might only work in photoshop but in theory it should also work in GIMP).