The lands of the ancient Manothian Empire

[Eilathen]

As always, i really love your map. It's just a style I really dig...again. I really hope you will do a in-detail tutorial (you work with Photoshop, right?)...

Great work!

[landorl]

I will post some instructions as soon as I get this finished. It's pretty basic stuff in Photoshop. The key is using lots of layers!

Now, I am also trying to work on the same map as a hand drawing map, but am having a hard time deciding on how to do the mountains. So, I am posting a portion of a map with three different styles of mountains.

Please, if you could comment on which you think looks better, it would be greatly appreciated! Also, any other comments are also helpful.

[Badger]

definitely the bottom mountains ... I prefer those to the other two types of mountains..

[landorl]

After looking at a few other maps on the site, I think that I have settled on a style of mountains.

Here is a new map with some of those mountains applied, as well as some of the text that I want to use.

[Badger]

I really like that style.. and the text is great, what font is that?

[landorl]

The font is "Anarion". I can't remember where I downloaded it from, but it is a free font.

I have been plugging away on the map for a few hours, and I have all of the mountains in, and my jungles. Here is the latest version.

[torstan]

That's coming on really nicely. This must have taken you ages.

[jfrazierjr]

I generally dont like the look of hand drawed mountains when mixed with top down trees. Oddly enough, on a black a white style map, they seem to fit in quite a bit better in my mind for some reason. Very nice so far. While not strictly B/W, the colors are nicely muted. Hopefully, as you add the forest and grass colors (if you are), they will be downplayed also.

Oh, and I really like the few swatches of texture in the desert areas. When zoomed in, they remind me of an oil canvas texture. The light color bleeding around the texture is really kind of cool.

Joe