Hello! This is, like the title says, my first attempt at a map. This was started around six months ago now and my first draft was in Paint (now that I have Photoshop, that sounds so bad to admit!). The map is a fictional world, the same climate wise as our planet (it's not alien in any way). It started out focusing on just a small area and now it's pretty massive since I decided to plan out the whole globe. This is for a fantasy novella series I'm planning and though it was originally limited to a small area, I was thinking that creating the whole world would be easier if I ever wanted to use different characters within the same 'realm' - and I'm also having a lot of fun mapping it and would like to include everything instead of abruptly cutting off a corner of a continent.

Feel free to critique as again, first time mapping, I'll probably do a lot of things wrong, but don't tell me something's wrong or inaccurate and leave it at that - give me the reason and tell me what would be more realistic, please.

The main map:

Fantasy world global map.png

Main map marked with fictional countries floating around in my head (the circle is where the main focus will be in the stories I have planned at the moment):

Fantasy world global map - marked.png

And the climates for the globe:

Fantasy world global map - climates.png

My reference for planning out the climates was from here. I feel like there's too much of a 'temperate' climate but once I have more accurate landforms placed - smaller mountains, the rivers, land elevation, etc - I'll add some more pockets of climate. What do you think?

I did the rivers on the map right now because I was experimenting; I'll change them if necessary later on. There are lines in the continents on the eastern edge because I outlined them, then filled them in, now have to clean them up; it's not intended to look like that right now. Those were the last that I planned. I'm also going to clean up the peninsula in the middle quite a lot - that was where I originally planned the world so that's why it looks so, er, weird. I'm going to trim it up a lot on the bottom and rid of many of the islands along it's eastern coast. Other than that, though, I'm mostly done with the first layer of landscape, have to sharpen up the edges, maybe add in some small floating islands - what do you think? Enough land or too much? Also, the mountains - are some of them completely off base or should there be more? I've read a lot of threads here of people talking about climates based on spherical shape, river placement because of land, mountains because of tectonic plates, that sort of stuff, and how important they are to take into account, so feel free to chip in if something looks off!