I recently joined up at the recommendation of a friend in my regular D&D group, and I am having a run at my fist regional map. This is my first map since drawing old school dungeons on graph paper back in middle school, and also my first delve into the GIMP. I have no immediate plans for the finished map at the moment; this is just an exercise in creativity and education. Suggestions are certainly appreciated.

I am walking through RobA's techniques, specifically his Artistic Regional Map Tutorial for the map elements and his Old Paper Tutorial for the parchment. I started with an outline drawing of Europe and inverted the land and sea regions. After fiddling a bit with the continental borders (Italy was too recognizable, and the Irish are already so blessed it seemed unfair to include them here.) I colored the ocean and the land, and added a few major cities/fortresses and trade routes. For fun, I threw it onto the stained parchment to see how it would look.

Click image for larger version.  Name: continent.jpg  Views: 102  Size: 91.8 KB  ID: 16529

I envision this as an incomplete map; large areas unexplored or mapped via legend and rumor. I think my next step is to lay in some major geography: a dessert extending off to the SW; high mountains filling the NW region; somewhere where thar be dragons. After that, labels. Hopefully by then I'll have some sense of where "home" is on the map, and I can zoom in on the next level of detail.