Hey everyone !

I joined CG a while ago and have been lurking and enjoying all your incredible maps. They all served as inspiration to me ! And now that school is over I've finally started a project of mine. A dear one. I've been working since I was a kid on a fantasy world in which I'm writing my novels and I always wanted to do a huge world map of it.

The world is called Alhenkell (although by morpholy of languages certain cultures do use variants like Eldendel or Al'an'al). It's a huge fantasy world which the map here only represent a part of. Although I know inside of me that there is still countless kingdoms and unknown lands beyond this map, I decided for my own good that for the moment I would focus on this part of the world that is already big. General tone of Alhenkell is really based on it's inspiration. It's dark and grim, but not as much as other fictions like Game of Thrones, Mistborn, etc.

Now for the map, this is just a WIP of the first step. I've never done a map in photoshop before (always on paper with a pencil) so I'm not sure what steps I should be taking in what order. Anyway, I drew a sketch of the map on paper, scanned it, assembled it in photoshop in a 10,000x10,000 pixels file and started to draw the outline of the coast on the layers above. So that's my first step. If anyone wants to give me tips regarding what to do in what order that would be appreciated.

I do it with my intuos5 small size tablet in Photoshop CS5. Coast are manually drawn.

So here's the first WIP. It's downsized from 10k/10k to 3k/3k for viewing.
Click image for larger version. 

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