First map of my world

[Sel93]

I dont have a name for my world yet, but I tried to draw a map and this is what came out.

Bare with me for the bad-drawn symbols (mountains and volcano e.g.), but this was the best I was able to. I started drawing this map yesterday and never did anything like that before.

I seek for feedback in terms of layout, "wrong" geography, and style.
Furthermore Im not sure about the placement of the names.

I'm German, so there may be some names that sound weird to you.^^

Thanks in advance.

[Asteconn]

It looks more to scale as a largeish island than a whole world presently.
I absolutely love the fact that your rivers, mountains and forrests make sense!

[Sel93]

Ok thank you.

Do you know why it looks so small?

[Ascension]

The scale (size) of your trees makes the land look small. This is a common convention, though, so I can look past that. I would say look through the tutorial section and the elements section to get some ideas on different styles of drawing mountains and trees...there are a lot of styles. As is I would say it looks pretty good except for the river in the north that goes to the ocean in two places (make it only one place).

[wally-d-feed]

I found a splitting river (those are truly evil ^^) in the upper right corner underneath the place called Erator. Here you can find some explanation when it comes to authentic rivers: http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...he-right-place

[Sel93]

Thanks for the advices.

Heres a new attempt. I changed the symbols (used a free brush from this forum for the mountains) and made the forests a bit smaller.

The map is not supposed to be perfect, but it should look as good as possible. Its just a map for a fantasy novel I write in my spare time.

[Gidde]

Yep, that "grew" the place quite a bit! Looks nice!

Edit: Eek! You have a nice WIP thread going and 0 rep? A travesty that I shall fix. Bonk.

[jbgibson]

It looks nice, Sel93. A further improvement might be to give the continent some kind of setting - the equator, or some kind of latitude/longitude, or an inset map showing where it sits on the planet. Placing some islands, or some indication that people sail off-map could keep it from looking like it floats in space. Typical annotations will go a long way toward settling its place amid the seas and skies - scale, legend, key.

You've done a decent job of distinguishing road/river names from other labels. There are places where now that you've decided on road placement you could go back and separate some crowded labels. For instance there's space to move Lantia apart from Silberstrasse. There's room to place the label for Branwyn over to the right of the town, avoiding the road. Ravells has a link to a nice paper on positioning names, right in his signature.

The font is pretty, but is getting hard to read at small sizes. Of course if your audience is German, anyone experienced at reading small fraktur won't have trouble :-). Where labels just have to be across roads, try gapping the road -- the viewer's eye will carry the line across without it having to be continuous. It's okay to use more than one font or variation of a font. For example, maybe the rivers' labels could be italic - then they could be larger and more legible, yet still easily distinguished from roads and forests. If you are going for a bit of a hand-penned fancy lettering style, a compatible variant might be all-capitals or small-caps. Or maybe you don't need more variation - after all, you have all the forests, roads, and mountains including walder, strasse, and berge/birge right in the names.

The forests might look more 'organic' and less formal-garden-trimmed if some of their edges trailed off into little patches and single trees. But a little of that could go a long way - too much and you landscape would be too busy.

It's looking nice.

[jtougas]

Edit: Eek! You have a nice WIP thread going and 0 rep? A travesty that I shall fix. Bonk.

I found that a bit hard to believe as well. This looks very nice

[Sel93]

Thanks!

But somehow my map still seems so small and not really like a world map. There are too few cities, too few mountains and rivers. I should have made it bigger than 1500x1125px, but I dont know how to correct that now. I would like to split the map into four pieces, one for each country (Eldaron, Antragar, Erotin and Lantia), but I dont know how to do this. Maybe I should start all over again, since the whole land mass looks not really great. But therefore I need a tutorial to how to create realistic land masses ... I saw it once but where can I find it now?