Untitled Campaign Map

[torstan]

Looking good. I like the mountains a lot.

The colours are looking very dark on my screen. Might be worth lightening them up a bit. For the sea, I've found that an overall radial gradient focused in the middle can really help - it pulls the eye towards the center of the map. It can be very subtle.

I see what you mean about the hills - they're quite sharp. Are you going to drop the mountains and hills back from pure black? You can experiment with this by creating one layer will all th linework on it (a copy of all your other layers of course), clicking lock transparency and then painting over your lines directly with a colour - dark brown for your hills, and perhaps a darker grey for the mountains? That might ease them into the map a little. Or it might look rubbish, but it's an experiment that won't break anything.

[Coyotemax]

Definitely going to move them down from solid, yes. I was messing around the other day with transparency, blending modes and layer effects, so far I think they look decent at about 70 to 80% transparency. I quickly got annoyed with the hill placement so i made a whole whack of custom brushes for this map, and used those to place - I think I have enough variety that it's not immediately apparent. That might be why they seem a bit sharper, I did shrink them some. I'll try a blur and see what happens.

Thanks for mentioning about the brightness, it's hard to know what it will look like on other monitors, on mine it's a little on the darker side, but I myself am having no troubles with it. Luckily that's easy to fix

I actually had a radial gradient on one of the earlier versions, but I was going to take a cue for my dark lands map and work in a layer with the shading as well. Thanks for reminding me about that though, I don't recall deleting the gradient layer, but it's definitely missing

[torstan]

I suspected the hills might have been a brush. The sharpness comes from the ery defined solid black shadow. Basically the hills have the same depth of shadow - and in many cases the same steepness on the sides - as your mountains. They look a little like small mountains with rounded tops. Perhaps drop the opacity of the hills more than the mountains to soften them up.

In terms of line colour - you can also change the line colour to a saturated light brown and then set he layer to colour burn - that can give some nice effects.

[Coyotemax]

I went over the combined layers with a dark brown and set to overlay. Along with a 85% opacity, it gave an effect I'm very happy with I'll post a screenie in a bit, I just want to get a few more things done in it first.

[Coyotemax]

I decided I will redo the rivers (or at least work over the current ones) to match the rest of the coastlines etc, they're a bit too smooth at the moment. I redid the entire coastline by hand, and it gave a nice look that I want to carry into the rivers and lakes

I also messed around a bit more with half a dozen or so adjustment layers, i'm nearly done fiddling with that.

The mountains please me like this, I'm just trying to keep the same look to them while I lighten everything (which has been a small bit of a challenge), I have a few ideas to try in that regard.

Next, the forests. But first.. naptime and the wife is dragging me out to spend time with the family.

Priorities, woman!! When the muse makes her presence known, I have to go with the flow!! sheesh!!

(overall, the colours weren't quite the way I envisioned the map when i started, but it took on it's own life!)

[Ascension]

My thought about the hills is that they're too detailed and wiggly - they look more like mountains than they do rolling hills. Just my 2 pennies.

[Coyotemax]

I'll be redoing the hills for sure. I haven't redone the rivers yet, but I think I'm finally happy with the background. Forests look great, and done in record time! I'll probably slap in a few more trees here and there to break up some edges, or redo the masks for the forest generator (i love that thing!!)

So far so good..

[rdanhenry]

My issue with the hills is that they're all elongated in the same direction, which makes them look like dunes rather than hills, at least to my eye.

[Coyotemax]

I'm in the process of redoing the hills entirely by hand. I took a break yesterday, but expect to get them done this evening. they'll look a bit different.

[Coyotemax]

I ended up not being able to do as much work as I wanted to on the hills, plus I've been having to take a few sanity breaks

I've got all the outlines done, and i'm about 25% done the shading, then I'm going back through to fill in the fine detail work and transitioning.

IRegarding looking like dunes, I'm adding a screen capture of the map that's influenced my style more than any other - Transylvania by Joan Blaeu (some of you might remember me training myself on that one, heh). That way you can see why I'm doing the hills the way I am.