Mercator experiment

[Ascension]

Qbista had asked for ponters on 19th century style maps and I know that those alternate earth guys probably have much more skill at doing that style but I said I'd try to whip up a tut or something (in Photoshop since that is what he uses) and this is where I'm at so far. I downloaded the Africa map that he provided and set out to replicate it as best I could. The combination of a color and pattern overlay for the countries took by far the longest to get exact and of course putting in the text was time consuming as well. Let me know what you all think and I'll fix what needs to be fixed before writing up the tut. By the way, I know I haven't put the mountains in yet but that's a fairly easy part. The fonts used are basic Arial and Times New Roman with some minor adjustments to the height scale (80%) plus some bold and italics. The one font I couldn't replicate 100% exact was the word "equator" although I got it pretty close...it's some sort of typewriter font and I dumped all of those years ago. I'm attaching the Africa map from Qbista and my first attempt at replicating it in PS. A vector program might be the better option for doing the shapes and lines but I'm trying to do it only in PS.