Aloha, folks,

I'm new to this forum and also essentially new to cartography. I started drawing maps during geography courses and freetime when I was ~10-12 years old but stopped soon after. Nowadays, I mostly do handdrawn fantasy maps with pencil & paper for my D&D group that I'm DM'ing, and also for a fellow friend and DM occasionally.

However, I recently (really meaning yesterday) stumbled over Warlin's Atlantide map here on the forum, and it blew me away. Now, inspired by that map I decided to try my hand at doing something similar with GIMP and - as one would expect - failed. But, with the help of Candacis' tutorial on "Antique Maps in GIMP" I was able to produce what looked like a decent map. It's not entirely finished, and as it was a test I won't be using it in the future, but it gave me some hope that with a little bit of work (really a large bit, probably) and patience I'll eventually be good enough to approach monstrous tasks like an Atlantide-style map.

To start my cartography adventures, I want to learn about how to do things like aging, borders, latitude & longitude lines etc. I prefer drawing landmasses, mountains and rivers per hand, using GIMP and the drawing tablet that I borrowed from a friend.

As an immediate starting point, I'm currently trying to figure out how to get a nice parchment background, a border and some latitude & longitude lines in GIMP before I start drawing my landmass etc.

Finally, I just want to say that it's great that a community like this exists. I've always had a thing for beautiful maps ever since I started reading fantasy novels at a young age. Especially old maps pique my personal interest, and it's great to have a hub where I can learn about cartography from people much more knowledgable and experienced than me.

Thanks for reading and hello there :),
Lucifer

PS: For those who don't know what I mean when I say Warlin's Atlantide map: https://www.cartographersguild.com/s...ad.php?t=36310