The Seventeen Major Dominions of Middle Wyrmenwaerve

[Daelin]

Oh, look. A map.

Yeah, so this one has some portraits in it. And some "crests" or whatever you'd call them. This is because sometimes I like to do other stuff than cartography in Photoshop, and I thought I'd try incorporating that into a map.

Since I don't actually know how to draw, well, anything, and instead of learning how to, through the years, I've come up with my own personal technique of being creative; it's called "borrowing" from the internet. I search various image resources (mostly Google Images) and... yeah, I steal the images I like. Then I rework them heavily, until I get what I want for my ideas, and I sort of mash it all together. Whether or not this results in something that is actually interesting and nice to look at, that's up to you. Now, I know I should credit the people whose work I've used, but to be fair, that would be practically impossible.

The portraits are also from various sources. One is of an old school mate of mine, one is a Danish singer, a couple are random people on the internet, and a few are drawings of people that don't exist. One of the things I do besides maps, is take photos of real people and alter them in various ways. I found a application called FX Cartoonizer, which, you guessed it, makes cartoon-ish versions of images. The app itself is absolute garbage: filled with bugs, crashes randomly, has few and only terrible features like adding cheap clipart to images, saves only to low-quality jpgs. But the filters it applies to photos does produce (at least to me) some interesting results. For example:
Portrait09.jpg

The land in the map itself is also a product of this process. A cutting and pasting of actual Earth (the source is shadedreliefarchive.com, I think, though I can't remember) and run through a filter in Photoshop (again, I don't actually remember which).
Whether any of this actually looks cool, you tell me.

Also, I had to upload a medium-quality jpg version of the map to get below the size limit. The maximum quality jpg is 60mb. So the map might not look super crisp.

Anyway, enjoy.