Thread: Elyden map

You have what I assume to be political borders which are drawn over top of your mountains. IMHO, this makes for a bad aesthetic. I would personally suggest moving the lines to conform to the contours of the terrain instead. Stolas is an easy to find example, but it happens all over the place. Outside of that, a quick glance gives me a warm fuzzy that this is is a great map....

Great choice of colors. I'm eagerly waiting to see more.

Originally Posted by Lyandra

Great choice of colors. I'm eagerly waiting to see more.

Originally Posted by Chashio

*s l o w whistle* P r e t t y! 8P

Edit: Ooh, noticed a little something... SW of Tarati, in the Anubian desert... It's difficult to read the city label (Anubis?) that's covered by the projection line. And, out of curiosity, how did you apply the color?

Yep thats it. too blatantly taken from our world? theres quite a few places like that scattered around the map.

The colours... i used an action that i came up with for making old paper and just made a blue clipping mask for the seas/rivers and brown clipping mask for the land. here's a screenshot of the action after its been completed and a page made with the action:


the clipped layers have a reveal-all mask with clouds and levels applied on top to produce the different coloured stains. the burn and noise layers are pretty self-explanatory though they are set to soft light and 50% grey fill (which becomes transparent when set to soft light). and then the burn/noise are applied manually. another layer on top called stains is then used to apply brush stains onto.

if anyone's interested i can post a proper tutorial for the page technique

Originally Posted by Bogie

Excellent map, hope you can find a better parchment, the pixilation is unfortunate.

There are some great high res large parchment image on deviantArt, I really like the ones from StruckDumb. This link will take you there.

http://struckdumb.deviantart.com/gal...5169?offset=72

thanks for that, the results a re pretty similar to the one i made above, though what im looking for are more in the vein of high-res paper crease brushes and stains to grunge up the paper.

Originally Posted by jfrazierjr

You have what I assume to be political borders which are drawn over top of your mountains. IMHO, this makes for a bad aesthetic. I would personally suggest moving the lines to conform to the contours of the terrain instead. Stolas is an easy to find example, but it happens all over the place. Outside of that, a quick glance gives me a warm fuzzy that this is is a great map....

not quite sure i understood you. in your example you mentioned Stolas - was that a good example or a bad one?

I think He generally disliked the political borders overrunning the landscape (Mountains)
But old Maps were all about coasts, borders and locations, aestetics were secundary so its ok with me. Only in modern times it is possible to do Maps for decoration purpuse only. And Most Maps here are Not in the style of maps used As trade Gifts or so.

Whoa! Really Superb!
Fantastic! And huge effort!

Originally Posted by vorropohaiah

not quite sure i understood you. in your example you mentioned Stolas - was that a good example or a bad one?

Well it's an example of the "issue"(as I see it), but it's not the best example(or in this case the one that looks the worst). It just so happens that that area of the map is clearly labeled ans thus easy to find the exact "location". Since i was on a tablet, I could not take a screenshot and point out the bits I think make it look bad.

You spent what I assume was many hours to create these great mountain symbols and then drop political boundaries on top of them which takes away from the final product. Since this is a representational map as opposed to a topographical or atlas style map where such boundaries might need to be precisely drawn, I would just favor a more lax approach to the boundaries since I believe it would make the map look better.



Another example that looks really bad with this approach in my opinion and probably the one I think looks worst overall is the long mountain chain South and SouthWest of Miharast. Don't get me wrong, I am not against general grunge(ie, the map got stained or dirtied in the past), the paper folding, or other destruction of the map contents that interfere with the mountain symbols since that's a consequence of age of the map(in "character" so to speak), it's just the political borders overlapping the mountains which bug me. I would prefer to see either the mountains laid down and then the borders drawn around them or drop the borders and then place the mountains around them. Of course, knowing how long it takes to create such a map, I know the latter is likely not a viable solution and even the former may take too much time to "redo".

Ok, I get you now. Most of the borders are a remnant from the older 'temporary' mountains so should be changed to convey more closely to the contours (where borders happen to fall alongside mountains). Though other than that I'm not sure what style to go for on the revised borders. I was thinking about a hand-painted wet edge effect. comments?

Thanks for sharing your technique! And, no, I don't think it's too blatantly taken from our world =) ... be kinda hard to avoid them all, might as well embrace 'em.

Border style... a wet edge would likely fit in with the rest of it, but how about trying one little section where the borders meet at a corner and play with it.

Originally Posted by Chashio

Border style... a wet edge would likely fit in with the rest of it, but how about trying one little section where the borders meet at a corner and play with it.

Well the mountains are now finished (shading and highlights. I must have cut/pasted well over 3000 individual mountains!) though im sure ill keep on tinkering as i add more key elements. Now its on to finishing naming the regions, then ill start work on polishing the key and experimenting with border styles.