Campaign setting map: Criticism and advice?

[Jeff the Green]

Hi all,
I just finished the map for my campaign setting, and I was hoping to get some feedback for it. (Anything and everything: place names, technical quality, etc.) This is the explored portion of the world, in the southern hemisphere, and covers an area about the size of the continental United States.

http://i631.photobucket.com/albums/uu39/JeffreyTheGreen/Adem-Map-drawing-thumb.jpg (http://fc05.deviantart.net/fs70/f/2012/042/9/a/adem_campaign_map_by_jeffthegreen-d4pflwv.jpg)
Click to embiggen.

Edit: Here's the new draft, with different mountains and shading around the landmasses.
http://i631.photobucket.com/albums/uu39/JeffreyTheGreen/Adem-Map-drawing-thumb-draft-2-1.jpg (http://jeffthegreen.deviantart.com/#/d4pw0w3)
Click to embiggen.

[Savannah]

Your mountains appear to be a mix of three different styles, which looks really weird.

The sea monster is awesome :smallbiggrin:

[Ajadea]

I like it, though you could probably replace the black mountains with the large shaded mountains. Possibly redo all of them in that style - it's the most fitting mountain you have. Just resize as appropriate.

The various towns and castles are adorable, and the sea monster kicks butt.

[Mazeburn]

Really cool stuff, your linework's lovely and neat. I'd also suggest possibly putting some kind of shading where the ocean is, at least around the edges? Maybe light hatching or something; would make the countries stand out a bit better. :smallsmile:

[ufo]

I absolutely love this map! It's very well done!

One thing, and it's not an artistic thing, more of a style-thing. The mountains seem like they are almost too well made. The fact that they are shaded gives them a 3D-feel that I feel isn't really present in any other part of the map. I think, if you make them much less detailed they look better in clusters, and that will make big mountain ranges (like the Frostwyrm Mountains) appear more imposing. And if they're less detailed, it will be easier to make small variations, so the mountains look less uniform - just like you've done with the trees, actually.

What did you use to make it?

[Jeff the Green]

I used photoshop, and I have to admit that I didn't really draw all the little details. They come from a couple free-to-use brush sets that I've found (most of them at this link (http://www.brighthub.com/multimedia/publishing/articles/87861.aspx)). I wish I could draw that well :smalltongue:.

I'm not all that happy with the mountains either, so thanks for confirming that. I'm working on replacing them and will post a new draft soon, hopefully.

[ufo]

Well, barring doing every detail by itself instead of using brushes (which will be rather tedious), when you use Photoshop you will inevitably run into problems when you want to work with many objects.

You could make a brush yourself, though. You just need a simplistic design (when I draw maps, mountains are usually just 2 or 3 lines in various sizes and compositions), and you should be able to find a tutorial on making a brush online, easy-as-pie.

Do you have the rest of the Adobe suite? If you have Illustrator, you can easily make two or three mountains and copy them everywhere since it's vector-based.

If you don't have Illustrator, you should see to acquiring it. Sometimes, even though the majority of a project is suited for Photoshop some things are just much simpler to do in Illustrator, and vice versa. That's why they're both in the Adobe Creative Suite along with all the other stuff and ridiculously overpriced :)

[Jeff the Green]

Alright, I'm finally back with the second draft (see the original post). I redid the mountains and added some shading around the landmasses. I tried to do hatching like Mazeburn suggested, but I found that without a tablet it's really difficult, so I settled for an airbrush effect.

Any more suggestions or comments would still be enormously appreciated!

[AsteriskAmp]

It looks rather good, you could try using a layer of posterized rendered clouds set to a lowish opacity (or a layer effect) and coloured somewhat saturatedly to break the sense of uniformity and give it more of an old feeling.