Thread: My first WIP

Actually, we care about the story as well
A good map conveys a story I think...

Anyway, nice map so far. Nice colors and the land is well done. Not too sure about the mountains... they look a lot like brown blobs at the moment. I suck at this style though, so I can't really help you improve them. I think you made it difficult for yourself by creating islands with just a small mountain on them

The smaller islands are all round. You might want to experiment with different shapes. I think it will make the map look more realistic.

Don't let anything in my comment discourage you, you really are on the right track.

There's only so much I can do to the little islands before they lose so much detail that they might as well not be there.

I haven't even tried my hand at any of the other tutorials yet. GIMP isn't quite as hard to learn as I thought it would be, seeing as how I've used Photoshop before, but there's still a steep learning curve here. The fact that the only artwork I've done in the past is simple sketches and some basic figure drawing doesn't help much. These are supposed to be tropical, and the tutorial in question was focused on a temperate region that was mostly land, so I should probably do some more practice maps before I start getting into this.

Tropical shouldn't be too hard, actually. Use a more vibrant green and a stronger contrast for the dark bits, thicker looking texture (though that doesn't seem relevant to this style), place more of it than you would for a temperate region, and you should be good.

I'm not familiar with the style/tutorial you're using so I can't offer much in the way of advice for the mountains (plus never worked with gimp). If there's a way to overlay the jungle over the base of the mountains so they climb up a bit in irregular patterns, that could help some.

As to the smaller islands, i notice you're at 1200x1200 for the image size - if you're comfortable working at, say, 2000x2000 you can stretch things out a bit to allow for more detail on the smaller islands (assuming your machine can deal with it).

Nice work overall so far though, keep working at it!

It will take time to get comfortable with the software... practice enough though and you will be able to create some amazing stuff.

I wimped out and purchased Campaign Cartographer 3

There's no trouble with my machine being able to handle a large image.

I actually went the GIMP route after, er... "demoing" CC3. The redraw rate on that program when you have just a few simple style sheet effects active is ridiculously slow. And really, the only thing that appealed to me about CC3 was all the fractal line/poly options, which makes it easy to make realistic-looking land. But the "not-so-random coastlines" method demoed elsewhere here eliminates my need for that, and the program can make much prettier maps at the expense of not being easily scaled. But I have Inkscape for that, don't I?

I like it. Your mountains are pretty good when compared to some others that I've seen. The only thing I would change are the island shapes, as mentioned. I'd make them more like cigars, long and thin but also sort of twisty...in your case here, don't make them thinner just longer and maybe bendy. Maybe combine two into one. The resulting shapes will sort of create a rhythm and movement to the whole that causes the eye to flow from one shape to the next (which you already have due to the "string of pearls" effect). Make them smaller and smaller as you get further away from a big island. Think of your big islands as mountain tops and the smaller islands as footie hills.

Since you're just learning, though, I think you've done a great job so far so keep up the good work. I think you're just touching the tip of the iceberg of what you're capable of doing because you have a very solid start and that usually means good things to come.

Please. When I follow that awesome tutorial that RobA posted this map practically draws itself. I'm just working from some sketches and I think that if I get this stuff done correctly it will really wow my D&D group and maybe even convince them to let me run the campaign.

Thanks for the support and suggestions. I think I like it here.

It's really a pretty darn nice map for what is pretty much a 'first-go'.

Keep at it, you'll get the hang of it in no time, I was absolutely terrible when I first started. Now I'm just slightly horrible.

Here's a redux hot off the presses, sans vegetation. I can't get the mountains to get quite craggy enough. I'm using a Gaussian blur and spread to set up the bump map, but I'm thinking I should touch them up with a fading brush before I do that again.

And of course I'm not sure how I'm going to get one or two of them to look like volcanoes. A bit more black in the center when making the bump map, then a lava layer mask and some spread lava-colored gradients?