Panhartha

[Eilathen]

I really dig the border. Very nice.
Cool map, glad to see you active again, D!

[Diamond]

Looking very nice so far; I adore the embellishments you've created - a bit of a Celtic feel to them. I'm not really sold on the city icons - I feel you could do something more interesting than a solid circle. Have you considered setting your strokes to outside to preserve a bit of the interior of your islands?

-I'll do some experimenting with the city icons. I'm kind of sick of dots too, but I haven't come up with any convincing alternatives that don't take up too much room.
-I like the thicker, smoother look of the stroke on the interior of the landmasses; when I set it to the outside, it ends up looking too rough. If I had Inkscape it wouldn't be an issue, but I haven't advanced that far yet.

[Diamond]

Initial color and texture test.

[Gumboot]

Nice colour scheme. There's a few potential climate inconsistencies but I don't know if you're necessarily concerned about that.

[Sapiento]

This develops very nicely.

[Eilathen]

Ah, a coloured map. You did a lot of b/w maps lately, so it's interesting to see you do a colour map again. Cool!
Care to talk about the flavour of this world? The border looks celtic or norse-ish to me.

[Lingon]

Looking awesome! Maybe try to desaturate the blue a little, see what that looks like? It's very strong compared to the land colors.

[Diamond]

Ah, a coloured map. You did a lot of b/w maps lately, so it's interesting to see you do a colour map again. Cool!
Care to talk about the flavour of this world? The border looks celtic or norse-ish to me.

Well, like I said in the intro, this is more just to get me mapping again, so I don't have anything planned out for it. I think what we've got here though is a cold part of the world, lots of primeval pine forests, tundra steppes, and icy mountains. I think the bit of southern continent poking into frame is populated by feuding, decadent city-states with a Moorish/Spanish/Egyptian flavor, while the main landmass has celtic kingdoms and tribes, with goblins, trolls, and a big dragon or two living high in the mountains.

Looking awesome! Maybe try to desaturate the blue a little, see what that looks like? It's very strong compared to the land colors.

Yep, I agree. This is what's going to take the longest (well, this, and coming up with suitable city icons, which I think I'll have to draw myself...). I'm going to play around with putting some color over the mountain icons too, snowcaps and such and see how that looks.

[arsheesh]

I liked it before but the colors really help make this map pop.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

[Diamond]

So I decided to revisit this. As you can see, things look a little different. I've decided that this is a sub-polar region, so I've distorted the landmass a bit to hopefully achieve some of that look without being too anal-retentive about it. The mountains were done using Ascension's Swiss Atlas tutorial, then run through a gradient map to get that pseudo-sepia look.