Floating Islands Map

[Green-Pilgrim]

Ever since I saw James Cameron's Avatar I became fascinated with the idea of 'floating islands'. As shown above, these are basically large hunks of rock that float / hover over some fixed point on the ground for various reasons. What I'm going to try and do is to map out a top-town map showing three different layers of floating islands.



The layers, shown above in the map, are going to represent the 'buoyancy' of each group of islands in the cluster. Each color represents a different approximate height of island. I'm still working out how to show this and what kind of map I'm going to use but if anyone has ever done something like this I'd love some pointer.

My guess is that I will use a typical 'overland' map as the background to suggest that the cluster is hovering over things like a forest and rivers and such. That combined with a diffused 'cloud' layer should hold the islands both off of the ground but still anchored within the image.

Showing relative depth / height should be an interesting challenge. I'm not sure if I can just use shading to make the lower islands darker than the higher islands.

Well... this is at least a start.

Comments Welcome
-GP