A map to accompany a story

[pyrandon]

Excellent map, Ravs! I'll read that story ASAP, but just wanted to chime in that I like the map a lot. I think the vividly colored version (if desaturated just a tad) is my favorite.

The "squareness" of the forest edges is a bit distracting; they look like giant pixelations, which contrasts with the organic feel of the coasts. Also, the forest fill itself is a bit to much like static for my tastes. The font choice is a good one, though, and adds a lot--as do the dual compass roses. Very nice! Also, I have no idea what "annual windages" are, but I love that aspect of the map! Intriguing.

Great job (as always), Ravs! Nice post.

[ravells]

Thanks Don! When seen up close the forest edges look horrible, I'll repair that with the clone tool in PSP after the map is done otherwise I'd have to pretty much start over - pixellation seems to be an occupational hazard with vector drawing programmes. I might use the woodcut tutorial to make a handmade forest fill to see what that looks like - that tutorial is sooooo handy. The 'annual windages' was just an idea I had to add lots of little symbols, charts and tables down the right hand side of the map, that one shows wind direction prevalence for each month of the year.

Cheers!

Ravs

[Midgardsormr]

I like the month icons. Are those original?

And since this map uses those navigation lines, I am prompted to ask: is there somewhere I can go to learn what those mean? I have not much knowledge of nautical lore, unfortunately.

[Gamerprinter]

I often use the "Autotrace" feature in Xara, which like Serif will create ugly pixelized edging sometimes. If a portion of the outline is extremely "pixelated", I view all the points created in the polyline shape and search for ones that need deleted or moved to an improved shape. Sometimes I use a combination of hand-drawn shapes within the vector application as well as relying on "Autotrace".

Just a suggestion.

Nice maps Ravs!