Yeah I agree with Tear, might think about softening the shadows just a bit, otherwise cool stuff as always.
My Finished Maps | My Challenge Maps | Still poking around occasionally...
Unless otherwise stated by me in the post, all work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
Love your icons, especially the little castle and tower. Your forest texture helps a lot with making them more visible but there are a few places where it goes over lakes and so looks odd.
This nitpick aside, the map looks wonderful. Great stuff.
Edit: Oh yeah, and personally I like the shadows being so bold.
Royal: I'm very sorry for your loss, your mother was a terribly attractive woman.
My Cartographer's Guild maps: Finished Maps
More maps viewable at my DeviantArt page: Ramah-Palmer DeviantArt
I'll check those bumps in the lakes, thought I had masked that off. The shadows were ... just plain odd. I started by drawing the lil icon thingies, turning them into brushes and then adding shadows by hand but when I got to the town icons I had a whole bunch of shadow to do by hand...not gonna happen. So I started putting them into the initial drawing. I usually like my shadows at 50% opacity but with them being part of the whole brush I can't change them now. I guess I could go back over them with a low opacity eraser in areas where the terrain is light so they don't stand out so much.
If the radiance of a thousand suns was to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...I am become Death, the Shatterer of worlds.
-J. Robert Oppenheimer (father of the atom bomb) alluding to The Bhagavad Gita (Chapter 11, Verse 32)
My Maps ~ My Brushes ~ My Tutorials ~ My Challenge Maps
I posted the icons that I made for this map in my brush thread here. Not as cool or as well-done as Ramah's but they served their purpose for what I needed.
If the radiance of a thousand suns was to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...I am become Death, the Shatterer of worlds.
-J. Robert Oppenheimer (father of the atom bomb) alluding to The Bhagavad Gita (Chapter 11, Verse 32)
My Maps ~ My Brushes ~ My Tutorials ~ My Challenge Maps
Just for fun I thought that I'd post how this map started...a blend my Jasmine Coast map and my Aalder map. Lots of layers, colors, filters, and hand work later I ended up with the first image in the thread.
If the radiance of a thousand suns was to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...I am become Death, the Shatterer of worlds.
-J. Robert Oppenheimer (father of the atom bomb) alluding to The Bhagavad Gita (Chapter 11, Verse 32)
My Maps ~ My Brushes ~ My Tutorials ~ My Challenge Maps
I have a question, btw your maps are beyond awesome, they make me *sigh* and think how much I suck... but back to my question ......
You started out with more of a google-ish photo looking map, but then you shifted to a more artsy looking.... did you have to completely re-skin the map, or is there a magic combination of settings to transform from google-ish to artsy?
I still have no idea how to make cool looking ground, so I use a pattern CoyoteMax shared, but its a bit too Google-ish... what do I do?