Isle of Randomness

[RJsDad]

Greets...

My first large scale map, not yet finished, but pretty close. It's simply an mash-up I concocted using RobA's "Using GIMP to Create an Artistic Regional RPG Map" and my own imagination and tweaks; judicious use of the clone tool to paint with patterns, and just plain damn blind luck.

I still need to put in more forest and a desert section, which will come later. Why Australia? 'Cuz I could: a nice, big empty image I could play with. My apologies to the Aussies. As for the big, rocky peninsula in the north-east section; if it looks like Iwo Jima turned 90 degrees, that's just how it turned out. Part of the blind luck stuff.

Anyway, comments are welcome. Be gentle, I'm a virgin (well, at least where maps are concerned).

p.s.: I know it's friggn' HUGE, but I'm too tired to scale it down atm.

TTFN

Attachment 62272

[fabio p]

I will not discuss the placement of the physical features, since, as you say, the map is a pretty random experiment. I will focus on the aesthetical point of view of the physical features; if as I think, the gray features you have drawn are mountains, well, they seem more ditches than mountains. Also, the relief in the “Iwo Jima peninsula” doesn’t look like a ditch but seems surrounded by a ditch.
And the other two brown reliefs …mmm…I can understand they are reliefs only by the brown colouring, not else.
So I think you should firstly rework a little bit your reliefs.
The forests maybe need some better blending with the terrain; as for the rivers, not a real expert here, but two rivers merging only at their delta, and a river splitting in two rivers, like that in your map: I don’t think they look really natural.
You know, as you said you’re a virgin and loosing your mappic virginity isn’t always a painless thing . I think you’re on a good road; only, you need some more time experimenting and maybe reading the tutorial section.

[Azélor]

If this is Australia at 7 692 024 km², it's a small scale map since objects appear a lot smaller than in reality.
And you picture is not that huge. It could be almost 4 times bigger.

[RJsDad]

if as I think, the gray features you have drawn are mountains, well, they seem more ditches than mountains. Also, the relief in the “Iwo Jima peninsula” doesn’t look like a ditch but seems surrounded by a ditch.
And the other two brown reliefs …mmm…I can understand they are reliefs only by the brown colouring, not else.
So I think you should firstly rework a little bit your reliefs.

This is my biggest hurdle. I cannot seem to get the process to work right. I look at the tutorial and the relief is so much better defined, I ALWAYS get this sort of trench thing on the mtn base; no matter how I work it, it never seems to match RobA's screen shots. As for the grey, yeah, you're right; hafta go back and re-design that.

There is a lot of hand painted detail, like the deltas, beach area and rivers/lake. All done after the finished layers. So I'd have to do an almost complete remake. But no big deal - it ain't like i got a deadline or anything. And as I'm sorta-psuedo-semi-retired, I got a lot of time to spare.

as they say: back to the drawing board..err, screen.....