After doing Pryme for this January's challenge I was in the mood to go back to a more hand-drawn isometric style for my next map. It's very early stages at the moment - just linework for the general landforms for the most part, with a bit more complete color and detail for the few surface elements of the map. And there are few of those - the base idea I had for this map was a regional fantasy map of a (mostly) underwater region, inhabited by one or more species of aquatic intelligent sapients. Figuring out even what I wanted from the basic landforms themselves involved a number of false starts - I wanted to strike a balance between plausible bathymetry and a setting that got my imagination going. Since a lot of regions off the coast of mid-ocean island chains drop pretty quickly down to levels no sunlight reaches, and I was more enamored with the idea of things like buildings on the seafloor but still inhabited by beings that, y'know, use vision, the map is focused on a regional level of a dipping subsurface shelf rather than open-ocean seafloor (which makes 'Pelagic' a bit of a misnomer in the thread title, but I liked the sound ). The elevation differential is pretty big and has more direct influence on the 'land' shape than any other isometric maps I've done prior, so I'm hoping this ends up nicely in the end.

'Tis here:
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Also experimenting with watermark styles.