My first map: Orlewyn

[Leif the Lucky]

Greetings, fellow cartographers. I would like to share my first map with you. It's the map of the kingdom where my D & D campaign starts, Olewyn. First I drew it by hand and then I retouched it with GIMP so that it looks like an old parchment. I intend to continue making maps for my campaign and I would like someone experienced to give me advice to improve and give them a more professional finish without leaving aside the part of hand drawing.
The map is in Spanish but the names are taken from Welsh si if a Welshman sees this, I'm sorry but your language sounds like a fantasy language for a Spaniard. Goodbye!

[Derek Von Zarovich]

Muy buen trabajo.

[Kellerica]

That's a pretty nice looking first map! I like the antique look it has to it. You said you wanted advice on how to improve and to make your maps look more professional, but I'm honestly having a hard time finding anything in particularly wrong with this one. You've got the basics of map-making down, and the rest just comes with practice. Maybe next time you could try playing with the labels a bit more, try some curves in order to make them follow the landmarks a bit more? Truly, just keep at it and you'll get there!

A great introduction, welcome to the Guild!

[rdanhenry]

I like it, and the mixture of Spanish and Welsh is certainly unusual. You might try just a bit of faded green color on the forests to make it a little more vivid.

As long as you aren't trying to present all the maps as made by the same cartographer, you can continue to experiment with different styles, since not all maps are the same. There's plenty of different hand-drawn styles to emulate on your way to finalizing your own. Look at what others have done, keep drawing, and don't be afraid to try new things.

In addition to adding color in GIMP, you may want to distress some of the maps more (depending on what their history is supposed to be), adding worn edges, tears, stains, notations by previous owners, faded spots, scorch marks, or other signs of use and abuse.

You may also want to work on little monsters to draw in the empty spots on the maps, to keep them interesting.

[nopkin]

This looks pretty awesome for a first map. Way to go!

[Leif the Lucky]

Thank you all for your advices. Perhaps my biggest problem is that I'm not familiar with image editing, much less with GIMP, so I'll have to go little by little.

[Brendo]

Very nice, congrats!!!