Phaldoria, a (newbie) world building project

[krostatina]

I just realized that the mentoring thread has stopped 3 months ago, I'll jump forward and post a sketch I'd like to work on.
Some problems are clear even at my eyes comparing it with real world maps:
- the coastline is unnatural
- the continent shapes are not varied
- even if it's better then the map we started with, it's still badly out of scale (to give you a measure, the ring of islands should be around 1-2 hundred km of diameter, and the map should span from pole to pole). I could sort this assuming the planet is musch smaller then the Earth, but this will change too many other assumptions (climate, calendar and so on), better redraw the map
- I would have liked to have one of the polar regions to be connected to one of the continents and mapped, but it will imply distortions that I'd rather leave out of the map. I'll probably go for an "Hic sunt leones" kind of thing for that area.

Any critic, suggestion and comment is wellcome.

[krostatina]

I'm slowly working through the tutorials, this is a map of the area around one of the main cities, I shoud add some roads that lead out of the mapped region and some symbol for the plain area. I have problems with the text function of GIMP, I read I'm not the only one, does anybody have a solution?
I need to practice a bit the symbol positioning, but as a first try I'm not too unpleased.
What do you people think about the river? I read that river positioning is almost a religion for some of you Perhaps a river who splits in a delta should be more distant from the mountains and more bendy on its course, right?