Tornalia (WIP - later stages)

[Scott Livingston]

Here is a map that I first drew over a decade ago. It depicts the setting of my fantasy novel, and I'm hoping to include a version of this map in a published book some day. Several years ago, I decided to try to turn the pages of hand-drawn maps into a digital map using Photoshop Elements. I've been working on this project off and on since early 2008. This is my first computerized map and my first project in Photoshop Elements, so I have had to teach myself as I go along.

Although I consider this map basically complete at this point, I'm posting in the WIP area in order to get advise and criticism on how to improve it. When I started this project, I was unaware of the Cartographers' Guild, so I primarily used the tutorial found here: http://www.zompist.com/howto2.htm. In the later stages of the project, I was influenced by many of the tutorials and completed maps here at the Guild.

The first two attachments here show the hand-drawn maps from years ago--the first image is the original version, and the second is a composite of several regional maps that I stitched together in Photoshop Elements. The third image shows the first two images superimposed on top of each other, with a blue coastline drawn over them. I used a Wacom Bamboo for this (an inexpensive graphics tablet is a great help when drawing a map).

For the details of the coastline, I looked at satellite pictures from Google Earth and tried to mimic the coastlines of several regions on Earth that I thought were a fairly close parallel geologically to regions of Tornalia. For example, part of the northwestern coast was drawn to resemble the fjords of Norway, and the middle of the east coast was modeled on North Africa. As you can see, I also added numerous islands and changed the shape and location of others.