[WIP] Antique Style World Map

[Steel General]

I think the national/country borders might be a bit thick/heavy - maybe reducing them some will make them more to your liking.

[moutarde]

Thanks Steel General I shrunk the borders ever so slightly, and tweaked them some more with the selection tools and they're much less precise now.

[Ascension]

Next, you might want to lower the opacity on the borders...depending on what you want the final background paper color to be and how much labeling you're going to do. Good job so far.

[moutarde]

I've been planning on keeping the paper texture as is, though you can't really see it on the jpg from reducing the image size and saving it as a low quality jpg to be able to post it here

Do you know of a way to lower the transparency of a layer without losing all its saturation as well? I'd love to make those borders more transparent, but not if its going to turn the red into pink.

[Ascension]

Use blend modes, multiply should work well or hard light. The lighter colors might have to go on a different layer and use screen or overlay. But, for me, the saturation is the whole problem...the colors are very vivid. You might want that though so it's up to you.

[moutarde]

First, I decided to cut out the irrelevant parts of the map for this post, so I could post the relevant stuff at full size

Ascension, I got a chance to look at my map on a different computer, and those borders look WAY brighter than they do on my laptop I toned them down a little, but I'm going to completely redo them after I've finished drawing the rivers, which I've started on up in the north east. I took a look at some of the tutorials here on tapering rivers, which didn't work for me, but led me to discover that I could fade opacity in the same way brush size can be faded, and I love it!

The main part of this update is to get thoughts on the mountains. They are quite small, but first and foremost, I'm attempting to recreate the style of the map I linked to in the first post, so it will take a lot of convincing to get me to make them bigger I also put a Distort->Ripple 30% on the mountains to keep them from all looking identical. I'm not entirely sold on this yet and if anyone has any better ideas on that front I'd love to hear them.

[Sapiento]

I think the map is quite good so far, but the mountains are very, very small.

[Diamond]

That is great so far; I love that style! Am I right in assuming that the red/yellow/green represent different continents and/or ethnic/cultural groupings? Looks like red is Europe, while yellow = Asia and green = Africa.

I like the way you've done your mountains, but the only thing I would suggest there is that you put more of them in (it's hard in some places to follow where the ranges are) and then maybe lower their overall opacity so they don't overwhelm the map.

edit: PS, would you mind if I snagged your first image post for use as a template?

[moutarde]

You're 100% correct there Diamond I've based it heavily off of our own Earth at the beginning of the 19th century.

I was actually thinking of putting a very subtle shading underneath the mountains - nothing that really stands out, but just enough to unify them.

And feel free to use that first image as a template

[Diamond]

I was actually thinking of putting a very subtle shading underneath the mountains - nothing that really stands out, but just enough to unify them.

That could work quite nicely.

And feel free to use that first image as a template

Thanks, man.