At times I experiment to see if I can come up with a new way of doing something and most of the time I never post it. Or maybe I do a small doodle map just to keep in practice. I may show these to my wife to get another person's gut feel but then send it to the scrap pile. Often as not it's because I don't have time or interest in finishing a "test" item. Still, I don't see any benefit in being so quiet and the reason I joined the Cartographer's guild was to learn to make better maps. Maybe someone will see another use or potential in something here that I failed to key in on.

So I will try to continue to use this thread to post my experiments that may or may not be used in one of my finalized maps one day.

This I made from clouds/difference clouds, a few layers of color. I think the main issue with it is it's lack of natural lines. I see some potential in the mountain shapes and the island in the middle on the right side of the map is my favorite. My wife pretty much hated this but then I explained I wasn't going for a real map just some style ideas. One of the things I want to achieve is a realistic looking coastline with the water thinning out into shoreline so there is some character to the undersea areas. The ocean is quite darkened out because for the most part the experiment failed in that regard. I do however kind of like the coastline portion where the land and Sea meet.

I also found that this looks kind of nice on one of my monitors but horrid on the other. I may have a calibration issue I need to look into.

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