Seandomhan (working title)

[Sonnenfalke]

Hey Guild,

after my first impressions of this forum I'd like to show you my work until now.
It's the world of "Seandomhan" (gaelish: "The Old World", working title - because I haven't the ultimate name until now). Seandomhan is a continent map of a bigger world surrounded by a lot of island realms. It's my first self drawn map. The programm I used was Corel Photo-Paint X4 and I followed this tutorial (german language) step by step.

At first I drew the landscape with black border on a white paper. Than I paited the water black and used the first texture for the land.
After a second layer for the coastline I drew mountains and filled them with rock structures/textures. Than I put the forests on the land - also hand-drawn and filled with texture. For all textures I used a Gaussian unsharp effect with reduced the details ;( but I had no choice because it looked so unreal without.
At least I reorganized the islands and painted the political borders on the landscape.

As u can see its a very amateur trash map and thats the reason I want to improve my skills in map-making

The original size of the map was 11811x11811 by 300 dpi (I want to print it on a 1 meter x 1 meter paper and put this on the wall next to my desk where I'm writing the stories of this land). I attached the map-progress in 1000x1000 pixel maps

My first next try is to repaint this map with Campain Cartographer 3 to have better woods and mountains a.s.o.

Sorry for bad english - hope u unterstand nevertheless.

o/

[Sonnenfalke]

And this is the "finished" map until now with the reorganization of the islands around the landmass.

[mearrin69]

Heya. Welcome to the Guild! Your English is perfectly understandable. It's better than my German (which consists of a couple of numbers, days, "yes", "no", and "I don't speak German".

I think you have some very pleasing landmass shapes. I don't detect any river violations, but I'll leave that determination to the official River Police. The main issues I see with it are that your textures are repetitive and that the map as a whole looks a little "flat". The mountains are, I believe, the main thing causing this. My best advice is to take a look at some of the tutorials (Ascension's atlas style is a good one) and try them out. It might be difficult to follow with CorelDRAW but I suspect many of the techniques will translate.

Good luck with it! And, have some rep for joining in with a map post.
M

[Aenigma]

First of all; Welcome to this magical guild of awesomeness!
Secondly; Your english is perfectly understandable, so don't worry!

I like the name of the place. It doesn't remind me of "everything else" (like 'araia' or 'nekreia'. Folk tend to like names that end in 'ia'...)
The right name makes the map, so to speak. Well done!
The name actually reminds me of "Seanchan" from the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan.

I'm looking forward to a world-wide map of this!
Grüße von Schweden! (I so rarely use my german, it's more rusty than Titanic!)

[Rythal]

Glad to see another corel user!

As was said before, the mountains look flat, and I think that that is the main thing that needs to be fixed.

Also, thanks for posting that tutorial, I'll have to try it out sometime

[tilt]

looks like a good start in mapping
All those islands are a little distracting/noisy to my eye - it doesn't really know where to go, but the world is a wonderous place and anything is possible. A quick advice for when you're uploading your next map is to make it larger so we can zoom in and see more details - that way we can give better feedback
... good work

[Sonnenfalke]

Thanks for the replies ... yes I know the islands are distracting but atm I have no clue how to make this better ... but now I'm here and ready for tutorials.

And I'll attach a bigger version (2952x2952 - all other version were too big for upload) of this map for better feedback



Btw.: what/who is the River Police? Any Link? -.-

[mearrin69]

The River Police are the forum's official "deputies" for making sure folks know how rivers work in the real world. If your rivers are looking improbable they'll be the ones to point it out.

Here's the list of current members:
http://www.cartographersguild.com/aw...ard&award_id=8

Here's a how-to thread on rivers (but yours look good to me):
http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...he-right-place

I guess the islands could be distracting (and maybe not 100% geographically accurate) but I kind of like them. I'm a fan of islands, though, and I'm not a geologist!
M

[jfrazierjr]

More than a few river violations. In almost ALL cases, rivers will not split when going from high places to sea/ocean. One exception is a delta, which requires a specific distribution of loose soil and time which shifts and breaks up into multiple branches. Your rivers should start at higher elevations with lots of branches and join together the closer they get to the sea/ocean/bay/whatever you call your body of water. Likewise, a lake can have multiple inflows, but in geological time will only have a single outflow(there could be more than one, but eventually, one of the two will win out and the other outflow will "dry" up.

[mearrin69]

Ah, well, you see...that's why I don't have a River Police badge!
M