Swamp 1

[Ascension]

Ok, so I was tinkering around with the idea of doing a swamp when GlassSphere put his up. I put this together today in a few hours and am looking for pointers, advice, critiques, etc. before I finalize my techniques for a possible tutorial. The huts are just there for scale as I'm still working on creating a style of my own for buildings (scale is 1 pixel = 1 foot). I did have fun making the towers though and the tower legs and the corresponding shadows.

[Midgardsormr]

Not bad at all. You might want to do something to break up the umbrella effect of your trees. They've got smooth, sharp edges that look unnatural.

Try selecting your trees, save the selection, then go to the new channel and run the spatter filter on it to roughen the edges. Use that as a mask on your trees layer, and it should make the trees look a little less plastic.

[ravells]

Dark, foreboding, wonderful! This is almost exactly how I imagined 'Farpoint' to look like in the CWBP beastlands map (here). except that it would be on the coast. If you don't have any use you'd like to put the map to, then if you're willing to coastline the top right corner, it would make a great Farpoint if you're willing.

[Ascension]

Do you want that river in there as well? If so, then do you want the town more inland or on the coast itself? Will the river bisect the town, will it be north of town, or is the town situated across many delta islands? The village I drew here was done in more of a "goblinoid" frame of mind so I'd probably have to change that to represent the actual denizens. At any rate, I map in my own lil world (not paying attention to any official fiction worlds) so I'd need some backstory or history and all sorts of info. To that end I could just do up the land and leave the buildings for someone else, no skin off my nose, but I'm willing to give it a shot nonetheless. It would be my first attempt at mapping for someone other than myself

As for the trees, I tried what Mid said and it didn't work out too well but I adapted that technique and actually created a brush out of a real tree then used a texture of something called treetopfill (don't remember where I got it from though). So that makes this style #10ish that I've tried for trees and now I want to delete that tutorial I posted a few days back and replace it with a new one.

[ravells]

Just take a look at the main map and then make yours a reasonably credible zoom in of that (which at the scale of the main map means pretty much what you want). Any backstory is entirely yours within the confines of the wider backstory on the Wiki (of which there is precious little). I honestly don't mind what you do with it and if Goblins live there .... well sobeit, that's fine too!

All I suggest is you look at the main map and see how you emote to it, then look at yours and try and repeat that kind of emotion....and that's it. The whole Beastlands concept was about emotive feel rather than how many blacksmiths a town can support given that it only has 5 bakers and 3 candlestick makers. Torq, for example saw Farpoint almost as the start of a Joseph Conrad 'Heart of Darkness' voyage...if you're too young to have read that then think of 'Apocalypse Now' which is pretty much the same story of a journey up a dark and mysterious river with a horror at the end of it - but you can make up anything you like - just as long as the feel of it resonates with you.

Thanks! I'm honoured that you'd consider it!

[RobA]

Is it me, or is this (and many of your recent images) real dark?

-Rob A>

[Ascension]

It's probably just the way I do things since most of my stuff is dark, bright colors don't look real to me and hurt my eyes (I have similar problems with sound as I like it to be more quiet than most people do). I've been thinking of doing an oasis so that should be quite a bit brighter though.

Cheers (where everyone knows your name)