My first attempt at making an Antique map

[Hannibal.Lector]

Hey All,
This is the first map I am making in Photoshop and I used brushes that I made and the brushes shared by Schwarzkreuz. So, thanks to him first. Now I have this ready. How to make this more, you know, live?

The landmass just looks like something taken out of a garbage box. Please help me.

-
Lector

[Freodin]

That's not too shaby for a first attempt. Nothing to be ashamed of. And I think that landmass looks quite fine.

What could you do to improve the map? The best thing to "make it more live", as you put it, is texture. Look for a fine background texture, some old parchment or paper. This is a very good tutorial on how to make such a background texture.

The brushes you chose are nice ones, but you should strive for a little more consistency and precisicion. Try to avoid overlapping brushes. Don't change the size of brushes to much. Also, try to keep the colour / contrast on the same level. In your case that would mean: make the brushes a little darker, more like the lines of coast and river.

Regarding the rivers: I like the way you did them. The uneven lines give it a kind of wood-cut effect. You could improve that by adding another "swirly" line in the middle of the rivers.
You should take note though that rivers usually do not split on their course from source to sea. Look here for a good starter on the layout of rivers.

Overall, a good start. It is always apreciated here to present a map in your very first post.

[Lyandra]

This looks like a good start. There are several things you might want to do to make it even batter. First of all your rivers don't look too realistic. In the real world, rivers usually converge, not diverge. If they diverge they usually do that over short distances or over short periods of time. Reading this thread might deepen your understanding of the river placement. The shape of your landmass doesn't look like something taken out of a garbage box, it seems quite nice to me, the coastline looks very natural and not simplistic. If you wish to try a different way of making landmasses you might want to try looking for example at this tutorial by RobA (it's for GIMP, but could easily be translated into Photoshop), this one by Schwarzkreuz, or this one by OldGuy (there are many, many others of course, just search the forum^^). To make your map more alive and interesting I think changing the background would be a good idea. Take a look at this thread where you can find wonderful textures by Coyotemax. I understand that you wish to achieve an antique look, the aged paper textures, that you will find there, will certainly help you with that. One last thing that strikes me as odd is the difference in the sizes of your trees. Making them a bit more uniform would look better in my opinion. To sum it up: I would suggest you take a look at the tutorial section, you might find there a tutorial describing how to achieve a style you are after. Like for example this one by Ascension for creating Antique-style maps in Photoshop. For Photoshop basics on the other hand, I find these tutorials by jezelf priceless, there is a part in them on creating realistic coastlines too. Practicing your skills with the aid of tutorials is a nice way of learning new things and a good introduction into map making. You can later combine styles and make one of your own. One last question: Are those white sections in the right hand corners parts of another landmass? If so, you might want to make them look more similar to your main one (but I suppose they are just not finished, right?^^).
Overall, a very nice map and a good use of brushes. I'm looking forward to how it develops.

[arsheesh]

Welcome to the Guild Lector. I won't repeat the advice that has already been given, I'll just say that some of the elements (e.g. the trees in the upper left-hand side of the map) are a bit blurry and out of focus. Otherwise, this looks like a nice classic D&D/Paladium style map.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

[Hannibal.Lector]

That's not too shaby for a first attempt. Nothing to be ashamed of. And I think that landmass looks quite fine.

What could you do to improve the map? The best thing to "make it more live", as you put it, is texture. Look for a fine background texture, some old parchment or paper. This is a very good tutorial on how to make such a background texture.

The brushes you chose are nice ones, but you should strive for a little more consistency and precisicion. Try to avoid overlapping brushes. Don't change the size of brushes to much. Also, try to keep the colour / contrast on the same level. In your case that would mean: make the brushes a little darker, more like the lines of coast and river.

Regarding the rivers: I like the way you did them. The uneven lines give it a kind of wood-cut effect. You could improve that by adding another "swirly" line in the middle of the rivers.
You should take note though that rivers usually do not split on their course from source to sea. Look here for a good starter on the layout of rivers.

Overall, a good start. It is always apreciated here to present a map in your very first post.

Thank you very much for your reply. I never thought I would get any for this work. It really motivates me to work harder on this. I'll work on making the rivers correct and the flora more oven and un-chaotic.

[Hannibal.Lector]

This looks like a good start. There are several things you might want to do to make it even batter. First of all your rivers don't look too realistic. In the real world, rivers usually converge, not diverge. If they diverge they usually do that over short distances or over short periods of time. Reading this thread might deepen your understanding of the river placement. The shape of your landmass doesn't look like something taken out of a garbage box, it seems quite nice to me, the coastline looks very natural and not simplistic. If you wish to try a different way of making landmasses you might want to try looking for example at this tutorial by RobA (it's for GIMP, but could easily be translated into Photoshop), this one by Schwarzkreuz, or this one by OldGuy (there are many, many others of course, just search the forum^^). To make your map more alive and interesting I think changing the background would be a good idea. Take a look at this thread where you can find wonderful textures by Coyotemax. I understand that you wish to achieve an antique look, the aged paper textures, that you will find there, will certainly help you with that. One last thing that strikes me as odd is the difference in the sizes of your trees. Making them a bit more uniform would look better in my opinion. To sum it up: I would suggest you take a look at the tutorial section, you might find there a tutorial describing how to achieve a style you are after. Like for example this one by Ascension for creating Antique-style maps in Photoshop. For Photoshop basics on the other hand, I find these tutorials by jezelf priceless, there is a part in them on creating realistic coastlines too. Practicing your skills with the aid of tutorials is a nice way of learning new things and a good introduction into map making. You can later combine styles and make one of your own. One last question: Are those white sections in the right hand corners parts of another landmass? If so, you might want to make them look more similar to your main one (but I suppose they are just not finished, right?^^).
Overall, a very nice map and a good use of brushes. I'm looking forward to how it develops.

Yes. Those white spaces are nearby landmasses. And just so you know, this is an island in the huge world that I'm making. The entire continent has one more island like this and the main continent itself which is about forty times larger than this one. After that, I've got a two other continents.

I'm gonna work on remaking this island and repost the new one here in about a couple of hours. Thank you so much for your advice.

[Hannibal.Lector]

Welcome to the Guild Lector. I won't repeat the advice that has already been given, I'll just say that some of the elements (e.g. the trees in the upper left-hand side of the map) are a bit blurry and out of focus. Otherwise, this looks like a nice classic D&D/Paladium style map.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

Thank you very much for your advice. I rework the trees and post again.

[Hai-Etlik]

With a pen and ink type map like this you want to try to give it a cohesive quality. You want it to all look like it was drawn by the same person with the same inks, and the same pens, at the same time, and getting it wrong shows up much more than with a lot of other styles.

Try to avoid scaling symbols as a drawn symbol has a very particular visual size to it. If you see two scaled versions of a drawing next to each other, they will look wrong. If you need a big tree and a little tree, they should be drawn at those sizes so the big one has more detail. Similarly, if you take two symbols drawn at very different sizes, and scale them to be closer, they will likewise probably look off in this style. Consider absolutely everything: the trees, coastlines, rivers, cities, labels, borders, and even the decorative dragons if you have them. Consider levels of detail, size, line width, contrast, etc.

Variations in blur, resampling, or anti-aliasing, are also very noticeable. Again this tends to result from combining symbols from different sources and sizes. That's not to say you can't mix symbols from different sources, you just need to be careful about picking ones that match.

Blur or excessive antialiasing in general is bad. You want everything to be nice and sharp, within the limit that you also want everything to be equally sharp. Good strong contrast is also desirable.

I try to do maps like this in pure black and white to start, and then add colour once I am entirely happy with the black and white. I generally work in vector graphics, but If I were doing raster, I would probably go for a very high resolution while I work in black and white, and then switch to greyscale or colour and downsample it.

Your terrains seem to form solid looking "lumps" often with boundaries that run along rivers. It gives your map a bit of a "patchwork" look. If you don't want to go into climate modelling, try to just give things a more "amoeba" look and don't follow rivers so much. If anything I'd be more inclined to run rivers through the centres of ecosystems than along the edges though being to consistent in doing either would look odd.

A fairly rudimentary climate model would be to pick areas as being "wet" or "dry" Wet areas tend to be forest, dry areas tend to be grassland/shrubland or desert. Areas around humans tend to get turned into farmland or pasture. Wet areas have rivers forming. From there they flow downhill and merge with other rivers as they go, until they reach the sea, they can pass through dry areas just fine if that's the downhill route, they just won't have many tributaries there. For a bit more depth, pick a prevailing wind direction, make the windward side of mountains wet, and the leeward side dry. For large landmasses, the interior will also tend to be drier. There's a LOT more that can go into a climate model, but that one will give you some ideas as to where to but things so that they look kind of natural and consistent.

[Hannibal.Lector]

This is an improvement of the first version. But, I still think this needs more work. I'll post another remodel in sometime.

[Hannibal.Lector]

With a pen and ink type map like this you want to try to give it a cohesive quality. You want it to all look like it was drawn by the same person with the same inks, and the same pens, at the same time, and getting it wrong shows up much more than with a lot of other styles.

Try to avoid scaling symbols as a drawn symbol has a very particular visual size to it. If you see two scaled versions of a drawing next to each other, they will look wrong. If you need a big tree and a little tree, they should be drawn at those sizes so the big one has more detail. Similarly, if you take two symbols drawn at very different sizes, and scale them to be closer, they will likewise probably look off in this style. Consider absolutely everything: the trees, coastlines, rivers, cities, labels, borders, and even the decorative dragons if you have them. Consider levels of detail, size, line width, contrast, etc.

Variations in blur, resampling, or anti-aliasing, are also very noticeable. Again this tends to result from combining symbols from different sources and sizes. That's not to say you can't mix symbols from different sources, you just need to be careful about picking ones that match.

Blur or excessive antialiasing in general is bad. You want everything to be nice and sharp, within the limit that you also want everything to be equally sharp. Good strong contrast is also desirable.

I try to do maps like this in pure black and white to start, and then add colour once I am entirely happy with the black and white. I generally work in vector graphics, but If I were doing raster, I would probably go for a very high resolution while I work in black and white, and then switch to greyscale or colour and downsample it.

Your terrains seem to form solid looking "lumps" often with boundaries that run along rivers. It gives your map a bit of a "patchwork" look. If you don't want to go into climate modelling, try to just give things a more "amoeba" look and don't follow rivers so much. If anything I'd be more inclined to run rivers through the centres of ecosystems than along the edges though being to consistent in doing either would look odd.

A fairly rudimentary climate model would be to pick areas as being "wet" or "dry" Wet areas tend to be forest, dry areas tend to be grassland/shrubland or desert. Areas around humans tend to get turned into farmland or pasture. Wet areas have rivers forming. From there they flow downhill and merge with other rivers as they go, until they reach the sea, they can pass through dry areas just fine if that's the downhill route, they just won't have many tributaries there. For a bit more depth, pick a prevailing wind direction, make the windward side of mountains wet, and the leeward side dry. For large landmasses, the interior will also tend to be drier. There's a LOT more that can go into a climate model, but that one will give you some ideas as to where to but things so that they look kind of natural and consistent.

Yes, I did not know any of those things. Thank you so much for giving such a detailed explanation. I must also say that I'm fairly new to Photoshop as well. I was intimidated by it before I stated working on my map. Now, I know a few menus and options to make my work a bit smooth. But still, I'm learning more and more every minute about it and map making. I am following two of the tutorials right now to understand how landmasses are made to look real and how to make antique style maps. Once I get an idea of those, I will work on making this even better.

I still am blank in many aspects regarding position of the rivers, placement of the mountains and design of deserts. I am making this world for my novel. Now, I know the land and its people well. But, making this map perfect will help me cater to the story even more. That way, the map would be a good companion to my novel and not just a guide. I have some doubts I need to ask:

1. Can a desert appear next to a grassland? Or vice versa?
2. Do forests necessarily need to be placed next to mountains?
3. Do rivers run around the forests or just cut through them?
4. How does one make the edges of the landmass appear a little higher than the sea?

If any/all of those questions are stupid and obvious, kindly forgive me. I accept that I am very dumb in this regard.

Thank you again for all your kind replies and advice.