Hello all! I'm new to the forum and decided I ought to bring an offering of two maps with my first post. I finished these about a month or more ago for a game I was running on another forum, and I'm still building on this world. I've always liked old, parchment & ink type maps over bright colourful ones, so that's what I was going for with these two. If these two maps should be in seperate topics, then sorry about the mess up, just tell me and I'll seperate them.

I'll spare you the exact details, but it's a heavy magic/fantasy setting, pretty reminiscient of Dungeons and Dragons or The Elder Scrolls. Oltenhi is the main focus of the setting, though it's only a single country, split up into five duchies, on one of five larger continents, on a planet called Titan, which exists in one of many planes of existence.

These were the first two maps I made in photoshop. I'd only ever used paint before (for maps). I don't use any flashy techniques; I user layers for convenience, made the parchment texture by following a tutorial, and simply darken the texture when I'm marking the oceans.

Click image for larger version.  Name: Titan Map Text.png  Views: 739  Size: 691.3 KB  ID: 49077

This is a view of the planet, Titan. It's less impressive then the second map, because I just wanted to give my players a view of the wider world. It didn't take that long to make, the Southern Archipelago probably being the most time consuming bit. I suck pretty badly at drawing land masses and I'm trying to improve, but most of the time they come out either too sharp or too smooth. The mountains on this one are also a bit bland, I guess.


Click image for larger version.  Name: Oltenhi Map Text.png  Views: 395  Size: 724.0 KB  ID: 49076

This is the map of the country, Oltenhi. It's more detailed than the world map, because it's obviously focusing in on a smaller area. I'm quite proud of this map, but not extremely so. It's still the best map I've made though. Like land masses, I'm not that good at coast lines, and something I've noticed recently is that I have a habit of drawing a relatively straight coast line and then doing everything on one side of it. I'm trying to fix that on my latest map, which is sort of the bottom of one landmass and the top of another, plus two islands.
I'm also not that good at mountains, but slightly better at them then islands. Most of the time I'll end up redrawing a mountain 3 or more times until it looks right. In hindsight, the large ones on the left of this map seem pretty damn big. The shading doesn't look to bad in my opinion, but I'm working on another map right now which goes for the more traditional style of simply colouring in one half of the mountain, and I think it looks a bit better.
I'm not entirely sure why I drew the forests and the capital city in black as opposed to the inky blue the rest is in. Maybe I wanted to make them stand out? I can't recall my exact reasoning at the time. I'm trying to improve on my forest drawing; I quite like what I was going for on this map, but I'm thinking of ways to make it look more canopy-like.


If anyone has some feedback, I'd really appreciate hearing it. I enjoy making maps, even if it does sometimes get a bit tedious doing one thing over and over again until it looks right, so I hope other people enjoy them to.