Fenwatch (medieval border town)

[Steel General]

Very nice for your first attempt, and you updates make it even better.

The only thing I really don't care for all that much is the trees, they still look more like green hills to me. *shrugs*

[msa]

I like the colors on the revised map a lot. I think they are very synchronous with the region and the theme. Really nice work.

It looks like you used a cloud layer to make the forests, which may be why people are confusing it with mountains? I used a different technique to make forests in GIMP for this map:

http://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=5622

1. Select the wooded regions
2. Feather the selections
3. Fill with correlated RGB noise (filter->noise->rgb noise and check the correlated option)
4. Blur slightly (maybe 2-5 px)
5. Duplicate the layer
6. Emboss
7. Set the layer to overlay
8. Use a threshold on the other layer to create the colored sections

That will give you a different texture for the woods that you may or may not like better. I may not have accurately got that all right, btw, so you may have to play with the technique to make it work for you.

[geoff_nunn]

Thanks for all the feedback everyone!

The only thing I really don't care for all that much is the trees, they still look more like green hills to me. *shrugs*

I go back and forth on the trees myself. I used the technique described in RobA's artistic regional map tutorial to generate them. He uses the same technique to generate his tress as he does to make his hills, so it makes sense that the results would look similar.

I think the issue may be more apparent in my map because I am using a regional map technique on a city map scale.

[geoff_nunn]

msa,

Thanks for the recommendation! I definitely do like the look of your trees , but they look like they are scaled for a map that covers a much larger region. I suspect I might get the opposite problem from people thinking my trees look like mountains. They might think they look to much like bushes or ground-cover.

That being said...
I really struggled on this map while making the areas of underbrush at the edge of the forest. I wound up hand painting them using the 'vine' brush option in GIMP and applying some noise and bump maps for depth. I think your trees would make better bushes, hedges or orchards at a city level than what I came up with for this map.

[msa]

Thanks for the recommendation! I definitely do like the look of your trees , but they look like they are scaled for a map that covers a much larger region. I suspect I might get the opposite problem from people thinking my trees look like mountains. They might think they look to much like bushes or ground-cover.

Yeah, I agree about the scale and my map, but I was ok with that. I just wanted them to indicate forest, but not actually be to scale.

I believe if you increase the blur you would get much larger 'treetops', so you might be able to increase the scale for your map. Like, blur 10-20 instead of 2-5 which, you are right, is too small for the scale of your map.