Quite some time ago... :) WIP

[MadLetter]

First, I love the color pallete. Very nice colors together. One thing I don't like is the contrasting styles with the hand drawn mountains and the texture fill for the forests (and to a lesser extend the dark lands). To me, it just does not mesh well in my mind.

Thanks for the compliment, I think I found mostly the right colours.

As for mountains and textures: Any suggestions? I found applying the noise effect to forests the most viable method of producing forests that look good.
Also the mountains... I really don't know how else to do them Suggestions welcome!

I stop by a website called DaFont.com, that's where I get most of my free fonts from (some 12,000 now although I can not use all of them at the same time because most programs will only load so many). So I rename them with a prefix and sort them according to style...GO- for gothic, GR- for grunge, HW- for handwritten, etc. and when I'm working in a certain style I just copy the needed fonts into the correct fonts subfolder in the windows folder then delete and add new ones when I change projects or styles.

Uhm... this shall not sound offensive, but what does this have to do with my map?

[jfrazierjr]

Thanks for the compliment, I think I found mostly the right colours.

As for mountains and textures: Any suggestions? I found applying the noise effect to forests the most viable method of producing forests that look good.
Also the mountains... I really don't know how else to do them Suggestions welcome!

For this style map, with hand drawn mountains, I would probably just use solid colors to represent your forests, and either hand draw tiny "trunks" or add a tiny bit of drop shadow to indicate height, depending on scale. You could add a small bit of very lightly fuzzy brush strokes with the brush tool to give a bit of illusion of the trees having some height variations. Take a look at http://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=1990 for an example from RobA. Also, someone else had a recent post in the past few days in color with similar style hand drawn forests.

Also, one of the things I have been playing with a lot in the past few days for hand drawn mountains is using the smudge tool within GIMP. In the featured map section this map comes from http://www.cartographersguild.com/fe...anthriaMap.jpg, has a link to a GREAT tutorial off site for how to make this style of map. Now, I know your map is not this style, but I really like the artists style of using the smudge tool to blend and I have been getting some great results with B/W hand drawn mountains using his technique. Not sure how well it will work with color, but if you like it, it may help blend the hard lines a bit better where your mountain meets the flats. It takes a bit of practice, and is a lot easier with a tablet and pen, but it can be done with a mouse if you take time and care.

Of course, this is just my opinion and suggestions, so it won't hurt my feelings if you don't them. I am just kind of anal about side view mountains and top view forests on the same map. Most of the time, it just does not look right to me.

Joe

[Midgardsormr]

There's a disconnect between the very fine detail of your labels, rivers and forests, and the wide, fuzzy lines of your coasts and mountains. I'm not sure if there's an "easy" way to fix that. Trouble is, they're almost begging to be redrawn, but I rather like the style you started with more than the one you've ended up with.