Thread: Yuriaah - Global map

Coastlines seems to look pretty good even if I think the lines around are a bit too pixellated and don't look that natural. (there's probably too much of it too) The areas font is hmm....kind of ugly....and doesn't fit the nice Title you did. You could work more on the background parchment which really needs improvement. Overall some good things there, keep up the good work

I don't like the waterlines. They look too edgy and computer made.
I would go with a more handmade look for this topic.

The headline is very nice.
The parchment is nice, too.
The names sound well.

I think the parchment might benefit from being lightened a little and desaturated a bit.

Also, regarding the water/coast lines. It looks like it has been done using the "expand selection 4px/stroke selection" sort of method. What you need to do to avoid it getting increasingly squareish is to use the smooth selection function.

Can we see the scribbled map, instead?

Your rivers are mostly okay, if considered as highly symbolic, not exact routes. In a real world ( okay, from a sample size of ONE) most lakes either fill to overflow their basin, and continue on to the sea, or else they did that once upon a time and the resulting outflow cut a gap or canyon. Not many will totally dead-end.

That long east-west river in Aldeor will need hills or mountains all along the southern Aldeor coast, to be plausible. Also remember that since water flows downhill and that is a very long river, the eastern lake that is its source has to be fairly high altitude, necessitating even higher land around it. That can be made to work, you'll just need to pay attention to details.

I've started to adress some issues on the map, hopefully the new handwritten text can be read if not I'll have to find some font in PS that can work. I've removed the waterlines entirely for the moment as well. @jbgibson: Since the eastern lake in Aldeor is already placed just beneath a large mountain range which I haven't placed on this map yet it won't be very hard to let the ground slope down from that and let the lake lie on higher ground then the river that flows from it. And yes the rivers shown are the larger ones and probably not entirely accurate, I can do some more work on them so most of them connect to another water source or show them disappearing in among mountains.

For some reason I can't upload a picture so I had to do it this way.
http://i892.photobucket.com/albums/a...g?t=1358383505

Here's the first more accurate drawings of Yuriaah although I've changed the layouts since I drew these, and also the only I can still find, sorry for the bad quality I have no scanner so they are taken with my phone.
http://i892.photobucket.com/albums/a...g?t=1358387433

I still don't seem to be able to upload pictures normally on my computer so this is done from my iPhone, unfortunatly the transparent bg was lost but at least I could upload a picture.
I have changed a lit on the map this time, the parchment for one and also added some colour to the continents and I have started to place down cities an land marks as well. I hope they sre visible on this resolution, also woods, mountains and hills are placed, btw Jinelu Tieru is supposed to be a desert.

Some good improvements here but the brushes you used don't really fit to each others (e.g trees and moutains or the faults in Peijanka with the other elements), plus you have some different kind of opacity/blurr that don't make the elements very neat.

It looks quite nice, but doesn't make sense as a "global" map. It doesn't show any distortion, and any global projection is going to have some sort of obvious distortion. The scale is WAY to large for a planet, this is more like the size of a large asteroid like Ceres (not that global maps can preserve linear scale but if they could, a planet would be much larger and need a much smaller scale to fit)

The graticule doesn't really fit. It looks out of place compared to the rest of the map, and graticules based on linear coordinates are rare except in certain specialized maps at large scales. They don't work on a globe if you look at anything but a small extent with a large scale