The Power of Shadows - World Map

[Stoj]

Hi everyone, thought I'd share the drafts of the world map for the fantasy novel I'm writing.

A few caveats: I'm well aware at this point that a lake should only have one river flowing out of it! Will be reworking that area in my 3rd revision. The circular mountain range around the Dulgur Wasteland is also not a natural formation, but the result of a magical cataclysmic event.

Any thoughts or criticism is greatly appreciated!

Here's my first draft below

[Stoj]

And here is my 2nd draft. Hand drawn this time. Working towards a 3rd draft which will hopefully use some sort of cartography software to give it a more professional finish.

Once again, thoughts and critiques greatly appreciated! Apologies for the poor photo. It's A3 and I don't have a scanner that can take it.

[Azélor]

I'm not sure I like the trees. Is it natural? It looks like they have been planted.

[Stoj]

The trees is just my current art style (or lack of one) to show forested area. Been looking over the forums to see how other people draw forests. It's all a learning experience. The 3rd revision has a mountain range along the border between Shinta and Venyar. It's definitely not meant to be a representation of trees on a 1:1 scale haha. Just "here is forest".

[Azélor]

In a real forest, trees would be spaced unevenly.

You see the tree trunks that are at the bottom of the forest , the other trunks tend to be hidden by the canopy. Unless there is a sufficient distance to allow the viewer to see the trunk. Because with this style, the viewer see the map at an angle (45 or 60). Portraying trees like you did, suggest that they are not that close.

Basically, at 45 degrees, if you see the whole trunk, it mean the distance is bigger than the height of the tree. So they could be 20m apart at least.

Of course you don't need to be that obsessed with maths to have a good looking map I'm just explaining why I think it doesn't look like a forest.

[Stoj]

Yeah I completely get you. I'm practising on a scrap paper so the next draft will look more like this. Just curious though, is this style usually meant to be used for closer maps? As I said, it's not meant to be a 1:1 scale, so you wouldn't count all the individual circles and know how many trees the forest has. A line of 5 trees on the map covers a distance of 100 km.

[Azélor]

You could do that but in general we can assume that the trees are not to scale and it is just a representation of the forest not the actual forest.
I think these samples looks good.

[Stoj]

Yeah, it definitely looks better with the overlapping shapes and the trunks at the bottom.