Welcome to Rjornhald: Fjords in the north, Calderas in the south

[woopingwooper]

Hi everyone. Any comments are always appreciated. I rarely draw and have only completed a small handful of maps. I love this forum because it provides both fresh eyes and great nuggets of wisdom.


So work has been brutally slow the last couple of weeks, and as I was sitting at my desk I found myself idly world-building for a new D&D campaign. Naturally, world building and map making goes hand in hand, so the margins of my notepad have been slowly filling up with coastlines. With an evening off I finally sat myself down to draw this bad boy.

DND Shi Map.png

The map is largely dictated by my ideas for a good D&D playing experience. There are roughly four areas:
1) The North West continent is supposed to be glacier covered fjords, ungodly-high mountains, and boreal forests.
2) The South Eastern continent has a monsoon-swept jungle on its eastern coast, a semi-arid interior, and woodlands on its western and southern coasts.
3) There's a small continent in the North East that has a west coast with numerous jagged rocks like fangs, because hey, fantasy trumps geology, and you gotta give dragons somewhere cool to roost.
4) There's, like, two random caldera-rim island chains in the south, because in D&D you always need somewhere exotic to crash where there's the possibility of pirates or cannibals.

Over the coming days (or possibly never, who knows with me) I'm planning to add in forest linework. I also want to create a set of small isometric city and town icons that I can swap around or change the colors of to populate the map. After that will come the bulk shading, followed by the part I almost never finish, the coloring.

[Josiah VE]

Nice job so far, the mountains look great.
Looking forward to seeing more.

[woopingwooper]

Quick update, just added a few forests and did my best to improve some of the coastal linework to remove the most gratuitous holes or thin patches.

DND Shi Map 2.png

I probably should redo the big forest on the western continent because it looks pretty janky, but I don't know that I'm interested enough to bother. I also want to add some subtle linework for the grasslands and along the coasts to give it all more depth. And I should probably clean up some of the mountains so that ridge lines don't have awkward holes.

Basically I'm putting off doing the initial color blocking as long as possible - I hate that part. I'm terrible at choosing color palettes, so early coloring is always tedious and unrewarding for me. But linework is soothing, so I'll keep going for now.

[woopingwooper]

Slow and steady wins the race.

DND Shi Map 3.jpg

Today I have added texture, rudimentary shading to the mountains, and had fun with waves in the oceans. I also did minor touches up to a bunch of random things. I also made some linework for city icons that I've ultimately tossed out. It just didn't work. Try try and try again!

Still want to play with color schemes before I commit much more work, but we'll see what happens.

[Abu Lafia]

Nice work so far wooper! I like your mountain ridges and the forests (especially the eastern ones, the western ones could need some more attention indeed ). The overhanging cliffs/peaks on the northeastern island's shore look very cool, i love this kind of landscape. The coloring looks really good too in my view, although it depends a bit on the other colors in the palette later on, as you said. Keep up the good work, it's very promising! Btw. the sunken obelisk is a nice touch.

[Azlodin]

It looks awesome! Mind sharing the colors/textures you used for the water?

[ThomasR]

I really like what you're doing here and I have to join Abu about the obelisk. A little critic though, some of your forests seem top down, maybe due to the position of the details you added (kind of in circle).

[Ilanthar]

Very promising! Everything looks great right now (except for that forest thing). Waiting for the next steps .

[ladiestorm]

I really love the depth shading of your oceans!!! Your mountains are looking great so far... I'm curious to see the rest of your color palatte!

[woopingwooper]

Thanks for the comments everyone! I agree with all of you - the western forests need to be fixed up. I'll get around to it eventually...

I'm not sure pleased with my work today, unfortunately. I hate picking color palettes because I can never get them to quite work. It's the same today. This was pretty much just an experiment but it feels, well, wrong somehow.

DND Shi Map 5.jpg

I don't quite know what I'm going to do with it, but I can't look at it anymore right now. Maybe it's an issue of saturation. Maybe its just that the colors are too solid and I need to (somehow) vary them up. I dunno. I'll come back with a fresh pair of eyes tomorrow.