Forcing myself to do something

[Ascension]

I had some ideas for new mountains, mainly making the shadows and highlights more prominent so that you could really see the undulations better. To that end I made myself open PS for the first time in about 2 months and just start messin around. The mtns look a lot like my normal mtns but I think they look better, shrug. Now I've got my colors all messed up for other stuff Ah, well...can't have everything I guess. It's not big and it's not the greatest thing but at least it gets me working again.

~A~

[Diamond]

Yay! New goodness from Ascension!

What do the gray X's on the mt. peaks represent?

[LonewandererD]

Hey looking good, indeed they are a little better than your other ones, but your other ones were great anyway. My only gripe is they are a little too white but i that's minor.

-D-

[Ascension]

The whiteness I've been working on cuz I feel the same way. I'll trim em back a lil more. The gray Xs are dungeons, didn't want to go with red dots...might just leave them out altogether.

[muddle]

This is very nice. i am particularly fond of the forests/vegetation. If you don't mind my asking, did you use something like a scatter brush and paint the texture in or did you use some sort of layer style texture overlay? I love the dithered edges.

[Djekspek]

good te see ye back in the saddle showing us new and more mapping greatness! Agree that the mountains and shading look fab (also the terrain color/texture is very nice). Only thing is that the shades of the higher peaks look a little too dark/black in my opinion. cheers!

[Ascension]

If you've done my atlas or continent tut then the forest is familiar...clouds, diff clouds (twice), 5% noise, lighting effects, delete the darkest colors, then add a small 5 pixel emboss and a color overlay.

[Ascension]

I thought I'd take a crack at that Swiss Atlas/shaded relief/National Geographic style recently posted. Re-uploaded the image now with roads, forests, buildings, and proper contour lines.

[guyanonymous]

The contour shading is looking great!

[waldronate]

Very pretty. One minor quibble about contour lines and rivers is that rivers cross contour lines at right angles as a general rule. For the most part these rivers are in deeply incised canyons and they "pull" the contour lines around themselves, but there do appear to be a couple of places where they are crossing at an odd angle.

It's good exercise to draw one map in several different styles (ideally to show different information). You get to learn a lot that way. A nice painterly style like the first one, a "modern" painterly style such as the Swiss style, a simple ink physiographic style such as done by Raisz ( http://www.decorative-maps.com/map-s...siography.html has some good examples), and a hachure-based style such as was popular in the 1800s will all cover a good range of techniques.

If you need inspiration, I heartily recommend the books Cartographic Relief Presentation By Eduard Imhof and General Cartography by Erwin Raisz. They provide overviews of types of presentation of terrain and maps. Cartographic Relief Presentation is a good overview of cartography written by one of the masters of the Swiss atlas style. It was reprinted by ESRI a few years back so it's much easier to get these days than it used to be. General Cartography is an older textbook that discusses many aspects of cartography. It's long out of print (published in 1948 as part of the McGraw-Hill Series in Geography) but there were lots of them printed and they turn up on eBay regularly for a reasonable price.
I also like Principles of Cartography by Erwin Raisz because it's a textbook on cartography. It was published in 1962, so it's mostly geared around pre-computer technology, but it has a great many discussions on various aspects of cartography and exercises for drawing features. Copies show up on eBay regularly for not too much.
An amusing read with some nice Raisz plates is An Outline of Geography by Preston E. James (the ones I have are copyright 1935). Reading this book shows how much the political world view has changed in the last 75 years. It predates plate tectonics as a concept and some of the assertions have been shown to be incorrect, but many of the discussions about climate are still applicable. I will admit that I bought a copy on eBay for $5 (badly written in and worn) just to scan some of the pictures. It's a great read, with quotes like "Of course, the regions which already support a dense native population are not open to European or American colonization."

OK, I think that's quite enough rambling for now.