Customized Compass Rose

[Coriolis]

I've been working up some supporting art to go with my latest large map project. This compass rose uses the heraldry of the ruling family, adds a couple of hounds leaping out to the east and west carved into the underlying stone, which is a blood marble (custom-made texture). The bevels for the dagger, eye, eagle, and wreath were done in Inkscape. All other effects were in GIMP. Rendering physical objects is a bit out of my comfort zone, so I'd appreciate some advice on how to tweak this.

[EDIT]After some consideration, I chucked that attempt and started over using a compass vector drawing tutorial to yield the following:

Still happy to take suggestions on how to improve this.


[/EDIT]

The map this compass rose is for (also a work in progress):

[bkh1914]

The new (second) compass rose looks very pretty and shiny.
Perhaps a little too shiny for the map.

I did notice that the dial has 120 divisions for the circle instead of the normal 360 degrees.
Also, the numbers are shifted 10 'units' (30 degrees) counter-clockwise from cardinal point labels.

[Tiana]

They both look too digitally constructed for my taste, and the current one resembles a clock. Unless the setting uses that enumeration for some reason–for example, my primary setting uses base 6, and the compass is thusly 6 pointed. I took a glance at your motifs and knew immediately what I would do. Now, my sketches are kinda crap but here you go.



The birds wings become the south arrow. The noses of the dogs/jaguars become the West/East arrows. Either the tails or the other bird wings become the North arrow. It uses a maximum of 3 colors–an outline, a flat, and a highlight OR shadow and maybe a splash color (I might make it gold, for example, with a bronze for the shadow, or a yellow for the highlight, but likely not both because this is a small design feature and I don't want to overwhelm it with shading. Then I might pop in red for the eyes, and maybe to add a bit of decoration to the feathers, since the blood marble is associated with the family.

Map itself is looking real nice though. The shiny text is nice. It is definitely more of a digital feeling map, so you might get away with putting the compass on as-is, just this is the way I'd take it.

[Coriolis]

Thanks to both of you. I fixed the offset of the "not degrees" on the compass, and while I think I'm going to stick with the digital look, I really appreciate the input and the very creative concept sketch.