WIP - Aronbor... or Perdon

[Ramah]

Ok, here is the image with the Ruhks in an (almost) complete state. (I say almost complete state as I think I will take some trees over the bottom left corner of the Ruhks label.)



I took the trees around the edge of the large text labels in there and as I was doing it I was becoming increasingly aware that it just wasn't working from an aesthetic point of view. With such large letters and the gap around it was starting to look a little bit too comic'y. Erasing a fair amount of the forest around the lettering made it look a lot better but still not exactly what I was hoping for.
So in the end I kind of scrapped the idea and went with a kind of background to it which I think looks ok. The only problem with it now is it kind of looks like it is the title of the map. :s I may try fixing this by treating the other country labels in a similar manner.

Still, my personal problem with the labeling in the forest doesn't take away from what I think is a pretty good method of doing the actual groundwork for the trees. Other than the fact I've not subjected the freehand shadows to quite the same blurring routine as the trees (and consequently, the shadows that were placed in with the multi-brush), I doubt anyone could tell it was done with some large tree stamps.

I've also spent some time today working on a few effects for the general background of the map. I've added a slight texturing to it and especially in the sea to give it a vague impression of waves. I think it works quite well but I'd be interested to see other's views on it.

EDIT: Actually, because of the loss of quality in the jpeg compression the new texturing effect is a lot less noticable in general.