Wyllahatchia Region Map

[jbgibson]

Nice work. Keep plugging away at the mountains and you'll get something you like.

I'd lose the distributary on the Nyllahatchie River. Yeah, one can occasionally see such an arrangement, but it's almost always temporary, or man-sustained. In general rivers join but don't split. The splittiness of your deltas is okay, but don't think of a delta as 'something that happens to a river as it nears a coast' - rather they are 'something that happens to an ocean as a river hits a coast and drops sediment'. You *could* have a delta that started in a bay and just coincidentally filled it up and creates a bit of coast in line with neighboring coast, but it isn't very plausible. Better if a delta sticks out some.

Candacis' tut, eh? I gotta work through that. This historical map style is one I'd like to be able to carry off.

Well done - I look forward to seeing it progress!

[Elpolloloco52]

Thanks for the advice. I actually was thinking of moving the distributary closer to the coast. It isn't a permanent distributary (in the hand drawn maps I have, it only exists for about thirty years, before the river changes course during a major flood). I will probably get rid of the delta, however, as I only added it in this map, and it doesn't really fit well geologically. The delta on the Hatchie, however, did arise from the filling of a bay. The laughing bay used to extend inland a good bit more than it did--the Hatchie filled it up, however.

Also, you unintentionally informed me that I need to fix the river names. It's called the Wyllahatchie, and it is where the region gets its name.

[Elpolloloco52]

I fixed the mountains. I used Rob A's Simple Mountains in GIMP instead of hand drawing, and I like the results. I may play around with shading, but they seem much better to me, and much less time consuming than my original goal.

Also, I started adding cities--just capitals for now, though. I used red for the symbols. I'll have to take a come back and see if that was a good choice, but I was wondering what you guys thought. The names on the coastal cities I made go at right angles to the coast so that I have more room. There are going to be enough coastal towns and cities to make things congested later on, and this seems like a fairly good way of resolving that. Also, I fixed the neatline. Now the checkerboard pattern matches up with the latitude and longitude lines, with three segments between each line intersection. I fixed some of the text as well, making the mountain range names softer and the name for the river "Wyllahatchie" look like that instead of "Nyllahatchie."

I also fiddled around with a fold. I think I'm going to tone it down a bit; however, I kind of like the aging effects I added to go with it (I mirrored the title vertically, applied some effects to it, set it to overlay, and turned down the opacity, to mimic the effect of leaving paper folded like that for an extended period of time, as seen in some antique maps). I might do that with some other parts of the map, though with a little lower opacity, to make it stand out less.

EDIT: Actually, I think one of the problems with my creases is that they all look like they fold inward. In reality, three should fold inward and one outward. I'll try to fix that eventually, but it's not on the top of my list.

[Elpolloloco52]

So I've decided to start over. Looking over my map, I think it could use a lot of improvement, mostly to look more elegant and refined. I relied too heavily on the grunge paper texture for the original, I think, and I overused a few basic filters. Basically, I'm going to try to do something more modern-looking (something like old national geographic maps, for which I found a semi-tutorial buried somewhere in these forums), then see if I can age it a little bit (not too much, though). I've got mountains to stand in for the real ones I'm going to use (I need to make a real DEM and greyscale shaded relief first). It will be topographical as well, and I might expand the actual map by about four times. I also plan to properly distort the map for a projection (not sure how to do that yet, but it shouldn't be too difficult. If not, I'll just make it Mercator). I should have a new map uploaded either tomorrow or next weekend (school prevents me from working on this during weekdays).

[Ascension]

I thought it looked pretty nice except for the mountains there.