My world map

[RobertAlexander]

Hello everyone, I am pretty new here and also pretty new to making maps digitally. I thought I would go big to start off. This is my world of Kaldera, it's the campaign world that my group and I have been using as our adventure setting for about close to 20 years so there is an abundance of lore but this is the first attempt in at least 10 years to make a complete world map. This is all pretty much freehand drawing, I traced a little from a hand drawn map to get the coastlines and messed with stretching it out a little but that is pretty much it. I just recently got GIMP and have used that to touch up a little, draw some river and add some green spaces but I am a total novice. I don't exactly understand the concept of "layering" and it's slow going for me. I would appreciate any comments or suggestions. Really anything that would help me. I see a lot of great maps on here and I am really surprised at the level of quality that is possible with these programs. Thanks!

[ChickPea]

Hi Robert, welcome to the Guild!

This is a very nice first map, especially when you're only just getting to grips with Gimp (it can be a bit daunting when you have no experience!) Your land shapes are good and your colouring is very nice too. Your mountains are, err, basic! Now, there's nothing wrong with that if you're happy with them, but you could look into downloading some Gimp mountain brushes (there are some here in the Guild, or DeviantArt is a good place to look). You save them into Gimp's brushes folder and they'll show when you select the paintbrush tool. They allow you to 'stamp' mountain shapes wherever you want without too much hard work. If you don't want to attempt hand-drawing, this might be a way to make your map prettier without too much hassle.

The biggest problem I see with your map is with your rivers. They aren't flowing the way rivers normally flow (e.g. many of them don't end up at the sea and some are splitting when they shouldn't). There's some info in this thread about how to get your rivers right. In a nutshell, have them start near mountains and flow towards the sea. Tributaries will join together and (generally) don't ever split again further downstream. Lakes can have several inlets but only one outlet. Follow these basic rules and you should be OK.

My only other advice is to watch some general Gimp tutorials on YouTube to get familiar with the basics of the program. A little time spent familiarising yourself with basic concepts like layers will help you tremendously going forward. Good luck!