[WIP] Atlas-style map

First of all, thanks to Ascension for his wonderful tutorial on how to do this. Without it, I would never have considered making my first map. I don't even have a name for the world or countries yet, since I just started playing. By the way, someone should tell rivers not to be so ridiculously hard to draw. My mouse hand is in dire need of a River Whisperer, or some smidgen of real talent.

Anyway, this is my very first effort. I have no idea what happened to make the continents look that fractured, but I liked the look of them, so stuck to it.

The darker parts of the map are really working for me. And I especially like the appearance of the northern ice field (North Pole?) and it's "edge". I find it to have a lot of appeal.

The southern dunes and the mountain peaks that approach white are a bit too bright, for me, to match up with the dark areas. If you darkened them up a bit, I think it might really work well.

I'm going to have to look up/revisit this tutorial as well!

Thank you for sharing.

Hmm...looking at the image close and far, I think one thing I'm having trouble with is the battle between the bright areas on the image. My eye fights between the white at the top and the bright areas at the bottom, but there's no easy transition between them. By darkening up the Southern portion a bit, I think your eye will naturally go to the top, then flow down the page, only to be pulled up again as it reaches the bottom...at least that's what happens in a lot of images like that.

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Originally Posted by guyanonymous

Hmm...looking at the image close and far, I think one thing I'm having trouble with is the battle between the bright areas on the image. My eye fights between the white at the top and the bright areas at the bottom, but there's no easy transition between them.

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Hi guyanonymous,

Thanks for the feedback! I had meant it to be plains an deserts, but I'll definitely look at darkening it up a little bit. It could also be because I have my monitor settings quite dim, so I'll have a look at calibrating that as well.

Perhaps, along with guy's suggestion, a bit of texture in the desert/plains areas would help as well. All in all, though, I like the coloring. Gives a fair impression of climate types for the most part. Well done so far.

GW

IIRC that tutorial uses a gradient to assign the colors, if you were to go back and adjust the colors used in that gradient it should help to alleviate the 'brightness'

Still a nice looking map, I'm a big fan of Ascensions tutorials.

Looks good to me; looks like you just need some cities, countries, labels, and maybe roads and then you can call it done. Good job.

I showed the map to the guy that's running the game we're going to be using it for. He thought it was nice, but that one of the continents needed a horizontal wall of mountains through it. Alas.

I've started working on the new map, which I'll post soon.

Don't ya just hate when editors come along and, with total disregard for your labor, suggest something off the wall? Are you going to have to rework the whole landmass to include his lil wall?

I had to redo the whole map, because the main continent was also not big enough for him. Then again, he does have the excuse of magic for putting a shield-wall in such a strange place, so I guess I can't even throw the book at him. He sketched out something like the accompanying map. On a lighter note, my mother has noted that the main continent looks like an extremely fat waiter. Now I can't stop grinning whenever I look at it.

Like before, I still have to do rivers, countries and labels.