I am drawing a map in Inkscape

[kiriona]

Yes.

Following the Wikipedia colour standards and using a heightmap I can't say I made, since I am not God (yet, anyway)—it's derived from NASA data. Which looks very realistic but is obviously very hard to customise if you need to...

Someday I'm going to learn how to draw my own heightmaps

Anyway.
The map, empty
It's uneven. I need to smooth it out sometime. Or at least blur the edges of the heightmap so it doesn't make it look so weird. Or just do without the heightmap.

This will probably serve to track how I usually draw maps for the curious few.
The map, with rivers—major catchments labeled
Note: I did not actually draw all the rivers. The ones outside the borders of this specific country I've mostly ignored for now. Will go back to them later.

Currently working on: Hypsometry. This will probably take a while but I'll update when I'm done.

[Lukc]

Whate are the Wikipaedia color standards?

[kiriona]

Whate are the Wikipaedia color standards?

Sorry—I guess my first reply never got validated. The Wiki standards can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Maps_template-en.svg

[ScotlandTom]

That looks like an incredibly believable system of rivers and tributaries for that region. Well done.

[Lukc]

Sorry—I guess my first reply never got validated. The Wiki standards can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Maps_template-en.svg

Oh, this is pretty cool! And yeah, I'm with Scotland on the riversystems - very good - what's the final goal of the map? Political? Geo?

[kiriona]

Oh, this is pretty cool! And yeah, I'm with Scotland on the riversystems - very good - what's the final goal of the map? Political? Geo?

This is going to be a European-sized country—haven't actually calculated its exact size, but the scale is roughly 1 px = 150 m.

Hypsometry is taking forever, each colour is taking me like 5-6 hours. Big map. -.- To give an example of what the whole thing will eventually look like, though, here are the islands on the bottom (with shaded relief).
Examplehypso.png

E: The more I look at it, the less I'm liking Wiki's light aquamarine-ish 0 elevation colour. I'll probably switch it out for a darker green later.

[Lukc]

A labor of love then I'll be glad to see what comes out of this!

[Midgardsormr]

That doesn't look like a height map to me, it looks like a light map. If you have an actual height map of this terrain (where the value of a pixel indicates its elevation), then you can do your hypsometry programmatically instead of having to draw it by hand.

[Michael Stenmark]

The rivers looks absolutely believable. I love it.
What is this map for ?

[kiriona]

That doesn't look like a height map to me, it looks like a light map. If you have an actual height map of this terrain (where the value of a pixel indicates its elevation), then you can do your hypsometry programmatically instead of having to draw it by hand.

Ah. No, this is not a height map of that type. (I'd be curious to learn how to make and use them, though...) It's just a greyscale shaded relief image superimposed over the map at 35% opacity. (As an aside I figured out why it was taking me so long—each bit would take about a minute to render—and it's because linked images slow Inkscape down a lot. With the shaded relief removed [I'll put it back later] it works a lot faster.)

Colour six of eleven now xd

@ Michael Stenmark - It's for teaching myself how to use Inkscape, mostly. I'm half-heartedly inventing a country at the moment—a vaguely Anglo-Celtic one to judge by the river names—but I doubt I'll do anything much with it right now.