Rithera, the Sundered Lands

[Wired]

Concept map for the game Star Chaser Story. Digitally hand-drawn in Photoshop. All rights reserved.

[ChickPea]

Nice work! I really like the wave textures you've added to the sea, the mountains look great and I love those cliffs around Cosmopolis. The forests are very dark, probably way darker than I would ever attempt, yet it kinda works. I like the colouring overall and it's a very eye-catching map.

[arsheesh]

That turned out really nicely Wired. The mountains look great. I especially like the volcano. Some of the labels are a bit difficult to read though. I think this might be due to the colors you've used for the font and the font stroke. For instance, the "Azure Expanse" is very clear whereas the labels on the land are less so, even though they are using the same font. Likewise I think the labels for the circular images at the botoom of the map would have been much more readable had you chosen to use the colors that you did for the Azure Expanse. Labels aside, lovely work.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

[Josiah VE]

Great job with this! The diagonal shading on the forests is interesting.. Different, but not in a bad way. Some of those handwritten names are near impossible to read, but I imagine that in the high res version it would be fine..
Those illustrations are nice too.

[Ilanthar]

Excellent map Wired. A beautiful color palette and some very nice elements like the "Wired' clouds" . Still no fond of the effect of the forests, though.

[Wired]

Nice work! I really like the wave textures you've added to the sea, the mountains look great and I love those cliffs around Cosmopolis. The forests are very dark, probably way darker than I would ever attempt, yet it kinda works. I like the colouring overall and it's a very eye-catching map.

Thanks, ChickPea. Creating the forests as dark and with such high contrast came from my attempts to find a way to distinguish between ordinary deciduous forests on the one hand and jungles on the other. As I didn't find a useful way to make that particular difference with the lineart I elected to go for a very dark, wet green instead. I've got another map in the pipeline that's almost exclusively jungle-centric, so it'll be interesting to find out for me as well how I get that done.

That turned out really nicely Wired. The mountains look great. I especially like the volcano. Some of the labels are a bit difficult to read though. I think this might be due to the colors you've used for the font and the font stroke. For instance, the "Azure Expanse" is very clear whereas the labels on the land are less so, even though they are using the same font. Likewise I think the labels for the circular images at the botoom of the map would have been much more readable had you chosen to use the colors that you did for the Azure Expanse. Labels aside, lovely work.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

Much of it comes down to the fact that this is presented at half the map's actual size. It looks nice and picturesque at full size, but undeniably it becomes hard to decipher the way it is depicted here.

Great job with this! The diagonal shading on the forests is interesting.. Different, but not in a bad way. Some of those handwritten names are near impossible to read, but I imagine that in the high res version it would be fine..
Those illustrations are nice too.

Thanks! The shading was just an experiment, one that wasn't met with appreciation across the board, but the first draft with "ordinary" horizontal shading gave the whole thing a rather "flat" appearance. I probably wouldn't take the same approach again, though.

Excellent map Wired. A beautiful color palette and some very nice elements like the "Wired' clouds" . Still no fond of the effect of the forests, though.

Heh, and I didn't even want to include the clouds in the first place. The client asked for them.

[Warlin]

Nice map. Love your volcano and yours clouds. I find the coast borders a little bit strong imo.

[Jayharchitect]

Very nice map, I like the colors a lot. There is a touch too much light edge around the fonts... the labels on the icon at the bottom feel blurry / hurt my eyes. (Probably just me!)