The foundations of a new world

[jbgibson]

The different degrees of smoothness/ jagginess that Viking recommends have terrain implications. Sharp, young mountains you figure 'continue out to sea', with their ridges and peaks becoming peninsulas and islands. When you see a smoother coast you'd generally assume flatter / gentler terrain adjacent. Some of the fractal world generators allow only one fractal degree for the whole globe, and based on Earth :-) that feels unrealistic. Clumps and strings of mountains alternate with plains and steppes and swamps. Your shapes are delightfully intricate, they could just use some beaches - which can have a different kind of intricacy. Look at the US Atlantic and Gulf coasts: barrier islands, capes of sand spits, river inlets, deltas -- and a few jaggy areas that aren't mountainous so much as drowned (the DelMarVa peninsula, and Chesapeake Bay).

A simple way to imply some of the high-latitude distortion Hai-Etlik mentions is to draw like you have, then progressively smoosh the land masses north-south, as you get further from the equator.

[Hai-Etlik]

A simple way to imply some of the high-latitude distortion Hai-Etlik mentions is to draw like you have, then progressively smoosh the land masses north-south, as you get further from the equator.

That's roughly doing a reprojection from Mercator to Plate Carree, but you still have to draw Mercator right, although that is somewhat easier than drawing Platee Carree correctly. You do have to be aware that everything in Mercator is getting bigger as you approach the poles. so you are in effect drawing the map at wildely different scales depending on latitude. And it assumes you want the map in Plate Carree in the first place, which isn't usually the case for a finished map as it's not a very good projection for most use cases. It is easy to convert from it to other projections though.