Pseudo-Faerun Style Earth

[moutarde]

I've gotten a fair bit into this so far, and I'm just not really feeling happy with it. It seems too cluttered. Despite having a colour palette of maybe 10 colours, and a complete lack of urban areas and labels, it already feels like there's too much going on. Oh yeah and I hate the forests Probably just need to spatter some more colour onto them though... Anyways, any thoughts on how to make this look less crappy are most welcome! I'm really close to just scrapping all the colour from this altogether...

[Immolate]

The colors don't bother me, which I know isn't helpful, but the mountains do. Perhaps some shading would rehabilitate them but at the moment they remind me of stitches. I feel the same about Caterpillar mountains, but I've done a map with those so who knows. I feel your pain my brother.

[moutarde]

Thanks Immolate I decided to go with the faerun-style mountains mostly out of pure laziness. Because the map is stereographic, the mountains would have to tilt to follow along the latitude lines, rather than just lining up horizontally. I found that kinda daunting But looking at it now, I'm also worried that doing the mountains different could end up cluttering things even more.

It might also be the more realistic-looking land colouring mixed with cartoonish moutains and forests that's bothering me... But I know that I don't really want to go down the swiss relief road...

My original thought for this was to go with a more antique-looking, muted colour style, like I did with the coreroads map. But when I ran into the stereographic mountain issue I decided to try something new (for me), but it's just starting to feel like a disaster, though I don't really want to give up on it completely yet...

Edit: Looking at the map this morning, the mountains would probably look better if the 'scar-looking' bits were closer in colour to underlaying colour. And I'm sure the forests just need more attention and loving (I hope!). I might just be being too critical of this thing...

[Gidde]

Another thing that might help is a bit of light shading along the "undersides" of the lines, to make them look a little more 3-d and less like stitches. I don't think it's hopeless in any case.

[moutarde]

Tweaked some stuff a little - turned off the forest layer, and just added a very tiny bevel to the dark green layer. I like it, but it makes everything else seem too flat. Might be able to do something about that, we'll have to see when I'm back at home with a computer that's able to handle this image better.

Also toned down the 'stitches,' and adjusted the bevel settings underneath them. The bevelling is most definitely NOT permanent. Gonna leave it on for a bit to make sure I like it, then redo it by hand. Might still end up going with iso-like mountains, but that's not something my laptop will like very much, not to mention time-consuming!

Realized this morning that I don't think I wrote down my process for the water... Hope I did, otherwise I'll have to redo it so that I can get the eastern hemi to match it

Still not entirely sure what I'm planning to do with antartica and greenland. They look like awful.