Greetings!

[zombieinferno]

I just joined a few days ago now when I came across a Guild video on YouTube. I am extremely pleased, albiet completely distracted now, with the amazing work that you all have on display.

I am very new to map making, having only once made the very briefiest attempt when I was an avid gamer many years ago. Now that the my soon to be step-son is trying very hard to bring me back into DMing, I decided to dust off some old notes to a project that I thought of probably 8 years ago.

I have a BFA in Fine Arts, but tend to focus more on illustrative or design in order to put food on the table. I tend to be more familiar with Illustrator CS3 so my first attempt was with that application but quickly decided it wasn't going to be the approach I needed. Ilustrator can be too... precise, and i really wanted to go for a more painterly approach, and eventually downright medieval in aesthetics.

I drew the landforms by hand in Illustrator after making a very basic rough sketch on scratch paper. The original was drawn some time ago but since my original vectors were lost long ago, I redrew the continent forms and made some changes that made more sense to the games planned. Once I decided to go into Photoshop, I simply exported the shape layer over and ran from there.

For now, I am still tweaking the coloration in some areas. What I have now is about 15 hours of work over the course of the past several days. Eventually I will do more focused maps of the main adventuring region and such, so I will definitely be looking at some of the more applicable tutorials I have found here. I don't see this map being fully detailed with anything more than regional names, continents, oceans, seas and a few major rivers.

Any advice, tips and criticisms are always appreciated. Even the bluntly honest ones, I made it through years of art school critics so you aren't going to ruffle any newbie feathers and cause me to dash off in a grumble.


Oh and I admittedly am not following strict geographic and climatological rules in this creation... my step-son really wanted an unusual fantasy setting so the large portion of the main continent was going to be wasteland/desert/plains. Trying to make a non-typical high fantasy setting has caused me more pause in the construction of this than anything else.

My overall aesthetic was to make this map seem hand-painted, since my goal was to have it nicely printed for the boy to have once I am done.