My World, called "Realm"

[Ankorafeonix]

Well even though I am a new contributor to this community, I have learned so much from
following Google links to this site, to firstly thank you to everyone who I skimmed pieces of
knowledge and yummy mindfood that helped me with my map-making.

It's taken a long time but here is the first stage in mapping my world called "Realm". It's
being used in a story that I'd like to write about someday... but I enjoy world-building much more
than story-crafting writing a story is hard! It's pretty big though, somewhat of an
alternate universe, based loosely on our world's geography but the point of deviation from our
universe probably would have occurred many millions of years ago, I guess when Pangaea
began to break up!

Anyway, here it is.

simplemap.jpg

Now that I have the shape of the world figured out I'll be working on a relief and terrain-based version
which will hopefully be prettier and more interesting to look at!

[Bogie]

Great start. I really like the ocean background.

[Erior]

Hi there!
I find some portions of your coastline EXTREMELY interesting and detailed. Can you maybe tell us how did you create it?
Apart from that, I suggest you to change the color of the political borders... that blue is easily mistaken for rivers ;-)

[Ankorafeonix]

Hey

Well Google Maps is one of my most visited sites as a budding cartographer I find there is no greater inspiration than looking at the amazing geography in our own beautiful world! In some cases I tried to get clever and sample some pieces of ambiguous-looking coast-line, but cleaning it up and color-correcting often took longer than just freehand. The whole shape and coast-line of the map was done in Microsoft Paint, which I found easier because it was simplistic and I only wanted to work with 2 colours, in a Bitmap file type so there was no feathering or fading. After I had the shape I just opened it in Photoshop and gave it some colour and texture.

Ha yes, the political borders. Something weird happened during the transition from Paint to Photoshop - haha I will give it some love tomorrow.

[gcolombo]

Looks awesome! Was it your intent for the map to roughly resemble an upside-down Earth map? I really like that similarity--it gives it a very realistic but also sort of distant and fantastical feel.

[bartmoss]

I had a river police heart attack looking at this map, but then I took and arrow- I mean, then I realized that those are actually borders. Great map otherwise - the coastlines are cool, I bet those took you a long, long time to create.

[cereth]

Nicely done...I like the landforms/coastlines a lot. I look forward to seeing more.