Style Test

[Diamond]

I like most of what you have, but the forest bothers me a little. I think that it might look better with either an outline, or possibly some sort of subtle texture. Maybe both.

There's a very very subtle texture on there now, perhaps too subtle. I want to come up with one that will make the forests pop a little bit more, but not too much; I don't want them to dominate the map. For that reason, I'll most likely not put an outline around them; espcially since that could confuse the path of rivers to the viewer's eye.

Note sure if you know how to do this or not, but I almost always promote using layer masks and fill the image with your "texture" and then masking out the bits you don't want shown(perhaps with Blur and a nice large fuzzy brush on the layer mask instead of the image.

Yep, I do know how to do that, and that's what I've got in mind for this. I just didn't get too in-depth on the sample.

[Ascension]

For feathering out that woodcut there are a lot of different techniques. The easiest is to select the landmass, increase the selection, feather the selection, invert the selection, then delete. If you want your lines to be pointy on the end then you'd have to make a dotted line around the coast then use some wind or motion blur. If you want squiggly lines then you also have to add a ripple or a wave. Myself, I use a small black and clear checkerboard pattern, then wind, then ripple, then feathered selection delete to soften the points.

What you have so far looks pretty nice