Borrowed Souls - The lands of Austenia

[Chris Terris]

Rift areas & messenger port.pngRift areas & messenger port3.png
Hey Everyone,
Created a story accurate overlay of the world map to my novel, colours are territories,
domes are energy fields of the nations capitals, and the light opaque lines which connect the cities are a form of subterranean communication.
REALLY useful to see all these details physically put together.

Feedback?

Cheers, Chris

[Encartrus]

The layout of the map and all looks really interesting, but the poor coloring distracts and in many cases blocks the ability to see your details. I'm assuming you are adding the color to an existing JPEG in Paint or somesuch, you may want to start over on the coloring using something like Photoshop or GIMP that would allow you to paint over your existing jpeg so you dont get the white "lost" pixels or eat away at your text.

[Chris Terris]

The layout of the map and all looks really interesting, but the poor coloring distracts and in many cases blocks the ability to see your details. I'm assuming you are adding the color to an existing JPEG in Paint or somesuch, you may want to start over on the coloring using something like Photoshop or GIMP that would allow you to paint over your existing jpeg so you dont get the white "lost" pixels or eat away at your text.

Thanks for feedback i took this on in my edits which i just completed. please take a look.

[Encartrus]

Thanks for feedback i took this on in my edits which i just completed. please take a look.

That's definitely a step forward! You still have lots of ghosted white pixels around your borders and could use some hierarchy for your text and effects. A lot of your names get washed into other things (like your roads).

Do you have the original, uncolored file? My suggestion would be to take that into a free editing program like GIMP or slap down the $10 for a month of photoshop and then make a new layer for coloring over the original layer rather than using a fill bucket tool. That way you can brush over the effects to make sure every pixel gets colored. If you added the text digitally and still have that saved, you may want to add a stroke effect to help keep two different layers of black text from bleeding into eachother.

It looks like you are using a forest brush, most of those have a nice single tree version of whatever clump effects available. You may also want to use that to fill in the spaces between your forests rather than letting the brush overlap. Looking above Innovia by Lugen is a good example of what I'm talking about here, you can see where the brush overlapped and it makes some funky looking shapes.

You may also want to update your legend to match your tree effects.

I'm really liking the feel of this world, the flavor of the magic bubbles and the emotional names for the nations seem like a great backdrop to a story.