August/September 2014 Lite Challenge: Blobland

[Chick]

I'm pretty new at this, and I'd be delighted to have any feedback, comments, critiques, or constructive criticism that anyone would like to give.


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[lostatsea]

You missed a # at the end of your prefix ! Looks pretty good!

[Chick]

You missed a # at the end of your prefix !

Thanks for catching that, I did a copy/paste and must have missed.

Also thanks for the compliment, although I'm not compliment-fishing. Any ideas for improvement on the map or on technique would be welcome.

[Chashio]

It does look pretty good! and I like your interpretation of the challenge. I think you've placed all the big items well, so my recommendation is just cleaning up the details.
The coastline bevel - I think I like it, or at least I like the bit of color around the edges that it lends, but I can't really tell if it's meant to represent sandy beaches or cliffs. It is causing a problem on many of the river mouths which could be cleaned up a little - simple fix if you don't want to change general effects is to make a new layer on top of stuff and just brush over the problem spots using the paint tool with the water color.
I'm not sure what's going on with the rhumb lines - granted I'm not an authority on such things and they may be fine, but they look a little drunk.
The mountains - The river by Ressin, and the one in the west of Domesh, overlaps the peak of a mountain just a bit. Yes, I'm a perfectionist. All of the mountains have a band of brown around them which doesn't quite fit with the greens they're sitting on... If they're on a separate layer I'd suggest taking an eraser around the top edges, and use something to fade out the bottoms where they're sitting on grass, and a hard round eraser the size of a treetop where they're sitting in forest - it would just make them look more a part of stuff than simply stuck on. Some mountains overlap their neighbor in a transparent fashion - another scenario for spot-fixing with a paintbrush and appropriate colors on a new layer.
The city icons look sharp when zoomed out (and I mean that in both senses) but they are very fuzzy when you zoom to the full size.
Labels look pretty good overall - just a few places that might be adjusted. Rogess Pass could probably be shifted to either side of "of" and still make sense. Mountains of Rain runs smack into Domesh... which I don't see a way to avoid, but if you lower Eventide a touch then you could pull the mountain label down away from Domesh for a little more space between them. The label for Wester Ocean... is it supposed to be that way or did you mean to add an "n" there?
Though not really necessary, some indication of scale might be nice.
Lastly, and this is completely personal preference, for this map I'd be inclined to add "Map by" to the signature, and maybe make it a little bit smaller and lighter blue so that it's still clear but not quite so attention-pulling from the map itself.

Hope that was helpful, and not too much.

[Chick]

Hi Chashio,

Yes, that is very helpful and not too much. The spelling of Wester Ocean was deliberate, but I can see why it looks like a typo.

The rest will give me some challenge to fix, and I really appreciate the time you took to do this, and all the super advice about details.

[Chick]

Chashio's ideas really helped me focus on some of the details. Here is a new version in which I have cleaned up as many of the problems as I can figure out how to.

In particular, the mountains were a nightmare. I originally did them with photoshop brushes. I made several shapes (inspired by some I found on the internet, but new) and set them as brushes. But all the research I have done today suggests that there is no way to make a photoshop brush totally opaque, so I can't make closer mountains completely cover farther ones. I finally gave up and did the mountains a completely different way. In doing so, I was also able to get rid of the brown rim problem which seems to have been due to resolution issues.

The original border bevel was quite by accident, but I liked it so I left it. In this revision, I couldn't get quite the same effect, so I did a deliberate one instead. Not sure I like it quite as well, but at least it looks more like beaches than cliffs.

Lines from the compass were added for effect, since I see them in so many other maps on here, but I don't have any idea why people have them running in all directions. I figured it was decoration, since true rhumb lines look quite different. I have removed them, until perhaps I learn more about them.

I also made new town buttons, this time using a fractal program to get a much smoother (and higher resolution) round shape.

I still haven't figured out how to make the forests hug/overlap the mountain bases. I played around with erasers and with stamp tool, but nothing really looked real, so I finally just left it. I suppose somewhere in here is a line between art and map, and I'm afraid that problem is failing the artwork and settling for map.

Thanks again, Chashio, for all the good advice and the time you took to give it.

Cheers,
Cornelia



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[Bogie]

Looking good Chick! The improvements help, I like the beaches a lot more.

[Chick]

Another quest for comments .... I deliberately left some of the forest edges hard and some soft. In art terms, the soft edges are probably nicer, but in mapping terms, sharp edges probably prevail.

Opinions welcome.

[schattentanz]

In my opinion, both look odd, since you are using a pattern to fill into a shape.
Maybe it looks better, if you add an outline to your forest?