First Map: Ascension(ish) Style!

[Steel General]

I'm with Ascension & Gidde on the forests - looks good so far.

[scarcow]

arsheesh, very nice looking map. May i ask you how you did those forests? I checked the tuts by Ascension and the GIMP translation by Gidde, but there was no mention of forests.

Thanks,
-sc

[arsheesh]

Ah yes, that's because the "forests" in my map are actually the "hills" in the tutorial: see Steps 10 and 23-30 for details on how to do this. Also, as Ascension pointed out to me, my forests were not quite dark enough, so I added an extra "Hill Color" layer (with the "Hill Outline" layer mask attached). I chose a dark green color for this layer (274204), set the Opacity of the layer to 65%, and set the Layer Mode to "Soft Light." You may want to play with these settings a bit to see what works best for your map.

Cheers,

- Arsheesh

[arsheesh]

Well, I think the end is finally in sight. I still have to place villages and ruins within "Eriond" and perhaps do a bit of touch up work. I tried to differentiate natural vs. man made geographical features by using different colors. I wanted the city names to be more prominent than the names given to the terrain itself. That said,I think perhaps that some of the terrain names may have turned out a little too obscure. I'm not sure. Any thoughts?

[arsheesh]

Alright, I think I've finally landed on a border style that I'm satisfied with. Initially I had intended to add decorative border ends, but after playing around with it a bit I ended up deciding that: (a) they were a bit of a distraction from the map itself, and: (b) they didn't look good enough to compensate for this distraction. I think that this style helps showcase the map a little better-the black seems to punch out the colors of the map rather than to compete with them. Best of all, while its been Arsheesh tested, iit's wife approved! Not that it was a big deal for her to begin with, but hey, glad to know that I have the support of my better half (who is also an interior designer/architect and knows quite a bit about art). Now the only thing left to do is name those roads and rivers. Heck, I might just finish this map before the start of my next semester of school after all.

Cheers,

-Arsheesh