First Serious Map Attempt

[arsheesh]

Agreed, great job for a "first attempt." I'll have to take a look at Gidde's forest tut, not familiar with it. I agree with Ascension's comment about the coast needing to be more jagged. I also think that there are some spots within the continent that are too dark and shadowy (I presume this is due to an underlying clouds layer). You might try lightening these shadowy areas up a bit. There are several ways to do this, but since you're using Gidde's Ascension style tut, I suggest just following step 34 and creating a third land color adjustment layer (using the colors form step 22 or as you see fit) and simply coloring over the dark spots a bit, and setting the layer mode to hue. Keep up the good work.

Cheers,

-Arsheesh

[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.