[WIP] The Eyasil Isles

[PaganoCristo]

Well, this is my first map. I'm very skilled with photoshop and Illustrator, so I wont be using other software..
Let's start from the beginning! this is the map I drawn by hand.
This place is a setting for a campaign I will be mastering for evil characters [Pathfinder/D&D 3.5], it just feels soooo good when you make your own place to play.

And this is the tracing result, there are no mountains since I need to "craft" them in Illustrator first.
I traced all of it with a simple brush tool (and a high quality mouse) and then I applied the "roughen" filter to the path to give it a more natural feeling. I'm using Illustrator because I can easily revert my changes without losing any data.

I will now move onward and add mountains, rivers and lakes. then I'll move to photoshop and start adding forests and FXs.

-------------------------------------- BACKGROUND INFO --------------------------------------

Map Area: 500km²
Population: ???
Latitude: ??? (between tropical and temperate maybe)

-------------------------------------- PROGRESS --------------------------------------

Tracing: 95%
Labeling: 5%
Background: 5%

[Chick]

Can't wait to see more

[PaganoCristo]

Step 2: tracing in Illustrator done!
I've added lakes, rivers, minor rivers.. and mountains.. yep, I borrowed mountain vectors from here. This project is intended for personal non-commercial use and I didn't plan putting too much work in it, so I found this resource essential.

Forest were made using "symbols" along with the "spray" tool, a method using a reference/instance system, letting you place same instances in an organic way (as a spray) and modify their single reference at will.
Anyway I hope to find a better way to render trees later in Photoshop, I need them now to figure out where important points of interest are in my setting.

[PaganoCristo]

Last night I was thinking about labeling my map, which I think will come to be the tedious part of this work.

The Eyasil houses these factions and plays as a flourishing, populated land. However political bindings are weak, corruption spreads with ease and conflicts grow rapid.
Not all of the land is under a realm's control and no central power has ever been established.
There are many commercial routes and many travelers passing bay in this huge crossroads between continents.
The central part of the map is the more civilized one, whilst the outer rim of the region is wilder.

I'll be using the Gentium Basic font and some kind of minimal work of labeling like that^
The guide on map-labeling I found on this forum is great by the way.

[waldronate]

Nice starting point. Your rivers flow a bit strangely. I recommend reading http://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=3822 to help out with placement. Always remember the golden rule of hydrology: water flows downhill; if there isn't a downhill, then you're in a lake or sea.

[PaganoCristo]

Yes, my rivers are weird.. some of them are planned in this very way for background reasons, the others however are not planned at all.. Mainly because I don't have any terrain height reference other than drawn mountains and what I have in mind. later in Photoshop I might draw a terrain height reference, but for now I'll go with what I have in mind.
I'll try to revise some of them and maybe find a more realistic solution but anyway this project was intended for private RPG necessities (for now), so I'm afraid I wont be paying much attention to geology or hydrology consistence.
waldronate, thanks for the tutorial anyway; I'll look at rivers and lakes in another way from now on when mapping!