Hi all

I said in my intro post that I am a man of little artistic talent, but that I'm looking into mapping to help me visualise my fantasy world for the novel I am working on. In slow dribs and drabs (most likely) I'll update my progress on that here...

Working solely in Photoshop, I started out by checking out some of the excellent tutorials here but then decided rather than try to make some of these different styles that look awesome, I should just concentrate on what it is I'm actually after myself. So, that basically means a predominantly black and white map, making it easy for me to update as and when with new features, cities, text etc. My world did in fact start out from a tutorial though, namely "Photoshop mapping with Chuck" which I stopped at about the halfway point after making the afore-mentioned decision. I went back though to the earlier stages as I quite liked the landmasses I'd ended up with.

The main continent I traced around with the path and pen tools, making a few little changes here and there, and then the islands I decided to select using the magic wand tool and converting to a path, as this would be a lot easier on reflaction, and certainly create better results on some of the smaller islands. As you can see, so far I've not got any other features in place, but I'm hoping to get some mountains and rivers in today if I can get the mountains to work how I want them to look. In the meantime, a work in progress update - and particularly as a first piece from a novice, I welcome any comments and criticism etc throughout the stages of my mapping

(Note, I scaled this to 50% for the attachment, not sure what size I'll keep the map whilst I'm working on it, but it is of course easier to scale down than up!)

Click image for larger version.  Name: wip1-50pc.png  Views: 115  Size: 91.9 KB  ID: 22087

Cheers,

M