Progress is slow. I haven't touched the land colours since my first failed attempts to figure them out. I went ahead and made some tree brushes but screwed up the first set and it ended up with a ton of white pixel artifacts so I have to remake them properly again. They take a long time though so I've been lazy and avoiding them. Not even sure if they work with the map. I'm really not sure how to represent the forests at all. I think some form of representation is necessary however as forests seem to add a lot to a map.
As you see I've laid out where I want my hills and laid in the plateaus I wanted. It looks kind of honky right now but I'm hoping that painting the hills will help alleviate the way they look out of place. Overall the colours are too saturated for the maps style. I'm definitely leaning to a plain tan background with these elements and the trees sitting on top.
My city plan didn't work out well since even tiny vignettes of the cities (I included a couple of examples) were too dominant and didn't fit the scale so I'm just going to use simple circle type icons. Maybe save some of them for border illustrations.
I'm happy with the scale I decided on for the map. The Scale Bar and the Compass Rose I'm happy with for the most part, I haven't planned their positions or anything really yet, just dropped them in for now. The scale will probably move to the map legend. And I think I'll reduce the size of the rose and perhaps re-orient it if I ever decide on where I actually want the equator. I'm definitely going to have to figure out a text solution that fits in with the map. I'll probably have to do labels by hand and scan them in to fit everything else that has been done that way.
I saw a map here today from a while ago that I love, and he weaved the text in with some features. It looks super cool: http://www.cartographersguild.com/fi...-durthaen.html I don't think I could get away with similar style though.
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