Country of Lantha - Captain of Fortune

[Soraya]

I upgraded my original map of Lantha for one of my novels, Captain of Fortune, to show my progress since I started making digital maps 5 months ago.

I changed some stuff, mostly added more islands and extended the central mountain range, added in the jungle, and did a full new border and compass that I love.

Here's the new map beside the original version, which was my very first digital map!
I kind of want to darken the forests a little. What do you guys think?

[Arimel]

I take it the one on the left is the newer map seeing as it has the forests & jungles mentioned. If so, it looks really good! The only slight negative may just be the way my computer is rendering the map but I think there is a mountain to the East of the 'Heart of the Jungle' that has a weird highlighting or white shading on it. I dont know if it was intentional or if it is just my computer or what, but it tends to stand out.

As for the forests, a little shading might help them stand out a bit more but the actual style looks really nice!

[Soraya]

I take it the one on the left is the newer map seeing as it has the forests & jungles mentioned. If so, it looks really good! The only slight negative may just be the way my computer is rendering the map but I think there is a mountain to the East of the 'Heart of the Jungle' that has a weird highlighting or white shading on it. I dont know if it was intentional or if it is just my computer or what, but it tends to stand out.

As for the forests, a little shading might help them stand out a bit more but the actual style looks really nice!

You're right!! There is a white highlight on that mountain! Weird! I'm going to have to dig through my Photoshop layer and figure out what that is LOL Thanks for noticing!

[ChickPea]

Very nice work on this. I like the land shapes, the compass and the border very much. I'm not completely sold on the white glow you have around some of the icons, particularly where it overlaps some other elements on the map. This is entirely down to personal taste, though.

I liked your first map, but this is a nice improvement.

[Ramah]

Hi Soraya,

On the whole I really like your map. I opened it up and said, "That's lovely" to myself.
But I do think there are a few things that you could improve. The first thing that jumped out at me is the blurry background. It looks to me like a low-res image has been blown up to fit the map size and draped over the map base at a low opacity to provide some texture. It looks to be largely pixellated in a way that kind of detracts.
The second thing to jump out was the mountains. You can see that you've made brushes and scaled them for larger mountains. They are very nice brushes, I really like them, but on your biggest mountains the outline of the mountain and the shading have visibly thicker lines. It kind of lessens the illusion that it was all hand-drawn.
And the third thing would be your coastal strokes which become very angular and pixellated the further they move away from the coast - one of the problems of automating that task.

Again, I don't want to sound like I'm down on the map because I really do like it and I LOVE your jungles.