Sea of Stars and Surroundings

[professorthunder]

This is my first map in Photoshop. I am not too pleased with my lat/longitude lines, and will probably modify those to make the projection slightly more realistic.
I blatantly ripped off the titleblock, fish, and compass rose from some 1600-1700's maps. The text is in atrocious machine translated Latin. I'm not too sure how to draw a compass rose across a spherical projection like this.

Created for a RPG campaign, The Sea of Stars is surrounded by the supercontinent of Oerth. Oerth is composed of three subcontinents, which I visualized equivalent to Europe, Asia, and Africa. The culture is on the downhill side of a cataclysmic dark age, and population is extremely thin, with society huddling around a few major cities and letting the rest of the continent fester, only maritime trade and travel preventing extinction. A world spanning ocean and a few small sized sub continents are all there is besides this super continent.

I will probably do an enlarged map of the Green Bay at a later date. I've only got names for seven of the major city-states, and detail on anything more than a few geographic areas is pretty slim. Providing Poetic Latinesque names for major geographic features would be appreciated.

The coast was generated using the Cloud filter, then turned into a path and stoked with a "rake" style brush. I (both at once) love and hate the "waves" around the coast. I love them, because they generally follow the coast, but are broken enough to not appear (overly) machine generated. I hate them, because at tight radii, the brush I used to stroke the waves turns into dots, and the waves only extend a few ripples from the coast, and the lines are too thick.

I will probably add some color and parchment effects later. Thanks for any comments or helpful suggestions!