[WIP] First map - Keris

[Niedfaru]

Hi guys,

I signed up a couple of days ago, and was advised to post a workthrough of one of the tutorials for critique etc. I was having a lot of fun playing with options I didn't even know existed, so I didn't get around to posting until now. I've already scrapped my actual first attempt, but it did give me a good template for the second.

I'm working through this tutorial. Gidde's brushes are amazingly time-saving, and since I don't have a lot of luck with most visual endeavours they really helped flesh things out. I also used RobA's tapered lines script for the rivers.

The map is of a region in a world I've used for several D&D campaigns, and I initially drew maps to make a frame for fleshing out the culture. The upshot of this is that I have names for regions in the world, and a few of the largest cities, but I mostly know more about the culture of the people than the names of where they live. I'm taking a break from the map now to get on with constructing the basic vocabulary for a naming language, so it seemed a good time to get critique on what I've done so far.

A couple of things to note: the huge area of mountains and hills to the west are not naturally formed, so they deliberately look a bit strange. I'm still not sure about having so many hills around them on the map, except that's exactly how I imagined they are in "reality". I'm also not entirely happy with the marshes. I've got some ideas on how to improve them, but if you have any, then please shoot.

So, after all that, the map of Keris: