Blueberry Bay

[jeph]

Nice work. Do you ever go back over linework in ink? This would look good more "permanent".

I've thought about it, but I'm not exactly sure how I'd go about it here. There's a lot of shading on the map that doesn't come through so well in the scan (which has the brightness and contrast tuned way up to get rid of paper artifacts), three-tone mountains for instance, I'm pretty crap at reproducing that with ink. I think a more serious version would be done with a better set of colored pencils or maybe watercolor, rather than pen.

Or have you tried ink linework + pencil shading before? Is it a nice effect?

Do I see a river arising in the mountains and splitting to become the western river and settlement river? A river won't join thusly, rather different tributary branches *join*as a river proceeds. Check out the excellent tutorial on Getting Your Rivers in the Right Place in the tutorial forum studying and applying its material will really boost your realism and plausibility.

Point of order, rivers splitting, while not exactly rampant, isn't really uncommon either.

River bifurcation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

It bugs me when people call real things "unrealistic." The world's a complex place, folks.