Jaxilon's trial and error thread

[Jaxilon]

At times I experiment to see if I can come up with a new way of doing something and most of the time I never post it. Or maybe I do a small doodle map just to keep in practice. I may show these to my wife to get another person's gut feel but then send it to the scrap pile. Often as not it's because I don't have time or interest in finishing a "test" item. Still, I don't see any benefit in being so quiet and the reason I joined the Cartographer's guild was to learn to make better maps. Maybe someone will see another use or potential in something here that I failed to key in on.

So I will try to continue to use this thread to post my experiments that may or may not be used in one of my finalized maps one day.

This I made from clouds/difference clouds, a few layers of color. I think the main issue with it is it's lack of natural lines. I see some potential in the mountain shapes and the island in the middle on the right side of the map is my favorite. My wife pretty much hated this but then I explained I wasn't going for a real map just some style ideas. One of the things I want to achieve is a realistic looking coastline with the water thinning out into shoreline so there is some character to the undersea areas. The ocean is quite darkened out because for the most part the experiment failed in that regard. I do however kind of like the coastline portion where the land and Sea meet.

I also found that this looks kind of nice on one of my monitors but horrid on the other. I may have a calibration issue I need to look into.

[Chick]

I think it has lots of potential, I can see the underwater coastal shelves easily.  I'd say keep playing with it

[arsheesh]

I agree, there is potential here. As to the coastline, you might try creating a B&W version, using the Select by Color tool and then selecting all of the sea regions (since there is less color tones there) and inverting it. This done, you could either stroke the selection to provide a coastline, and/or create a new layer filled with an off-white or tan set to overlay, which might help make the land "pop" out of the sea better. Just some thoughts. Nice to see you at work again.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

[J.Edward]

I concur Jax. This looks like it could be something good depending on where you take it.
It looks cool right now. I can see a lot of stuff you could do with that.

[Jaxilon]

Thanks everyone. In that case, I will try again showing more of the steps involved and see what happens. I think when I said the ocean failed I mean the overall texture of the seabed. It was just unnatural imo. I then went and looked around at all my favorite maps and it seems most don't really take on the ocean texture either (it's sort of eluded to but not emphasized). So, maybe that will be next on my lists to fight with