Question about Drawing Regional Maps from Global Master Maps

[gkoch1]

Hiya, folks. Very new here so apologies for any formatting issues as I learn about the forums.

Very quick and basic question for you:

I'm drawing an entire globe and am hoping to make regional maps from the global map. Am I better off making a very general global map and then getting into rough coastlines in regional maps (i.e., redrawing the regional maps based on the general idea of the global map) or should I add all the intricacies into my global map?

I'm working in Photoshop but may actually redo everything in Illustrator for the vector properties, though I'm much more fluent in PS.

The goal is to do an atlas-style world. My question really hinges on this: Would I be better served to redraw all regional maps or could I get away with adding all my detail to the global maps? Currently, my global map is about 36000px wide. I kinda feel like I should make one master global map and then simply crop into it to form the regional maps but I find that when I zoom out on the global map it looks kinda weird if I've added in the regional details. I expect this is because I don't really know how to approach this style of map making.

I hope all that makes sense. If you've made it all the way through this post, I thank you. And if you have any suggestions that might disabuse me of my ignorance, I will thank you even more!

[Redrobes]

As a fairly new member to the guild I would urge you to have a look at the community world building section and look at Guild World and at the big zoomy map:

https://www.cartographersguild.com/l...ype=guildworld

This one is 16K pixels wide so only 1/2 of what you are planning. If you zoom in on the world areas then you can see that the resolution is not really enough to cover it well. Ideally we would need to go in several more stops to get down to town and city level. There always appear to be a gap in scale between continental regional maps and city maps. And yet if role playing in these worlds then the area of scale covered by the gap is pretty useful stuff.

To make the guild world map we have J.E. rough out the continental shapes and break them into sections and then we all map a section each. I think its easier to map the detailed coast from a regional map and then combine it to the world than it is to detail the world map and extract that to the regions. But better still is to rough out all of the levels down to town and city mapping and then add detail across all of the levels and have the software combine the maps together.

[gkoch1]

Thanks for the note and the great tips! I'm going to have to give this whole project some more thought.

My initial plan was to build a global map for a world roughly the size of IRL Jupiter so that I'd have LOTS of room to work. And I was definitely thinking a top-down approach but I like your bottom-up one as well. Hmm.