So... I was looking at some pretty landscapes a friend was sharing with me, to sooth my ruffled feathers about a river issue... and there was this picture I skimmed past, but then I went through the pics a second time and realized it was one of the most beautiful (land/water-wise) things I'd ever seen. I didn't realize it at first because it's in a really dirty/ugly/metro place.

Normally, that wouldn't have occured to me at all... I don't paint metro areas... but when I saw this I thought "I want to map this".


Not, "as is" with buildings and factories and roads and smog... but, like... as a part of a larger fantasy world.

In essence, what I want to do, is steal an island. The whole island, with the river/falls around it, and the river banks on either side, and take the whole thing and clean it up.... send it back in time to when it was fresh and new and untouched by mankind. Then, I want to populate it PROPERLY with a race of people who will take care of it, and preserve it (some sort of elvish people, maybe) and build it up into a pretty little village and ... nevermind.

Point is, although I would be re-working *everything* (And all the actual marks on the virtual-paper would be mine,) I'd have to steal an island first.

I don't have any ethical holdups about this... I paint landscapes. That's what we do

BUT all the fantasy maps I've seen (and tutorials) here are about drawing your coastlines and whatnot from scratch or from random generations, and I started to wonder if stealing existing land forms is even allowed. (Or at least frowned upon..)


So, what's the etiquette for something like that? I don't mean someone else's work or their created worlds.. I mean, places that actually exist, that you could see from an airplane or a photograph or... you get what I mean, right? >.<