First Serious Map Attempt

[koewn]

Thanks for the feedback!

I agree on the coast - this started out as a scan of a rough sketch, and I'd been playing with ways to use RobA's "Not So Random Coastlines" to get it to jag out. I'd gotten halfway there; the inlets intruding into the mountains on the northwest and southeast portions of the continent are a result of that fiddling, but it didn't "take" everywhere - zooming in you can see some jaggedness, but in other sections it still looks pretty smooth.

I may try fiddling with distorting a selection of the coastline mask to see if I can induce some jags in the smooth bits.

The shadows are better than they were - they're mostly an artifact of bending RobA's "Not So Random" into "Almost Completely Not Random". I'm on a different monitor now (LCD) looking at my post and they're a lot darker here then where I'd been working (CRT). Sounds to me like an excuse to get myself a widescreen LCD

I'm not sure what I was drawing when I did it, but my 4 year old daughter told me it looked like an angel - tilt your head to the right and assume the round sea surrounded by islands is the angel's face and you can see it.

Gidde's Forests are here:

http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...orests-in-GIMP

Koewn

[koewn]

OK, quick update. I curve-lightened the land cloud layer, and that took out a bit of the shadows. I recolored it after that, as the southern portion of the continent went all desert, and I didn't want that. I also re-bumpmapped after the lightening. The darkness now you see in the northwest and south of the desert is the new gradient colors, they're a touch dark in the middle.

I took my coastline as a selection, I distorted it with 155/2/2/1, no smoothing, then reapplied that as the mask. I've got a slightly dark coastline stroke on there right now to highlight what the distort did. It gave a bit more small-scale jaggedness.