This is the first map I've done that I felt worthy of posting here. It's an attempt to create a somewhat realistic atlas style map. It's an island off the southern coast of an even larger island. I thought it would be easier to start with a something small then trying to get this much detail into a continent size land mass.
The original map was hand drawn on paper and then imported via scanner. I colored in what I thought would be a rough height map in Photoshop and then exported a grey-scale image of that file into Wilbur. After eroding, adding noise and re-sampling the image, I imported it back to photo-shop to manipulate the colors, lighting, ocean and river features. I'm not sure I'm entirely happy with the color scheme right now, but it's still a work in progress. Most of the time spent manipulating the map was agonizing over the distance scales. Once that was nailed down, I put in the distance and elevation scales and drew in a border. The corners of the map indicate the planet's four moons, which was a map design suggestion of a friend of mine.
As far as what I need to do, I still need to add in some graphics of the moons themselves. Additional place names for mountains, ridge-lines, and towns and cities etc. will be coming down the road when I get a spare moment.
As far as some background history, this island is a somewhat recent (re?)-discovery and is in the midst of being colonized and having its resources exploited. It's also being used as a base of operations to counter the growing threat of the regional power to the island to the north. Therefore, most of the civilized areas are nothing more than small forts or camps. There are ruins scattered across the northern part of the island (which I'll need to add to the map) indicating previous inhabitants, but whoever they may have been is still a mystery.
I welcome any comments or feedback you may have.