Quote Originally Posted by töff View Post
If you want a criticism, I'd say the wood doesn't work well as quadrants. I'd use a single wood texture, or I'd have more planks. But that's just me.

I really like the mountains. Did you bevel/light them, or did you build the left & right sides separately or shade them manually?
thank you!

You are right about the wood -- I think my first big improvement will be to find a better scan of some wood grain. At first I thought that having the map made of separate boards might be "cool" but it's really just distracting.

The mountains are either two or four vectors apiece -(four for the snowcaps). I did the basic shading by using brightness/contrast on the same wood texture in Fireworks to get the two/four shades.

Then, there is an internal bevel filter on each mountain to give each some separation from its respective neighbor. Each mountain chain was then grouped and given a "raised emboss" filter. The light angle is rotated 180' in order to make it look recessed rather than positive, if that makes sense.

I *love* the effects in fireworks because the interface is very easy and intuitive. It's too easy to abuse though