My first map try

[amberroberts09]

I think you should make it more clear....

[ukie]

I don't understand that. Did you erase the rivers from the land?
I guessed you painted them in a separate layer over the land.
I think your rivers look very good.

Sorry. What I meant is that The lakes are just "holes" in the land layers and I "erase" the rivers out of them. After that when I do the 1-2 px outline of the contour the lakes look good but the rivers outline is too "sharp".

[jbgibson]

Sorry sometime my English understanding is... how should I put it... thickheaded what do you mean by that?

Like the rubber stamps used for printing with ink. Or the stone seals used to print signatures in old China. Or the carved potatoes used to print in art class. :-) Moveable type, only with cartographic symbology instead of text. Who's to say that the mappers of another society than ours might just value uniformity of neatly stamped mountain-symbols over our valuation of cleverly uniquely hand-drawn mountains?

[Freehand 5.5]

ukie, you could do a separate layer for the rivers. If you have that, you can soften the edges, redo color or reposition parts anytime as you please.
Do you know how to do that?

[ukie]

Like the rubber stamps used for printing with ink. Or the stone seals used to print signatures in old China. Or the carved potatoes used to print in art class. :-) Moveable type, only with cartographic symbology instead of text. Who's to say that the mappers of another society than ours might just value uniformity of neatly stamped mountain-symbols over our valuation of cleverly uniquely hand-drawn mountains?

Gotchya thanks for the tip!

[ukie]

ukie, you could do a separate layer for the rivers. If you have that, you can soften the edges, redo color or reposition parts anytime as you please.
Do you know how to do that?

Funny you mentioned it. I just started having problems with it. I did some free transformation and now when I Ctrl left click on the layer of landmass and do Select>Modify>Smooth This is what happens:

Untitled-2.png

To make things even worse now all the brushes are acting weird (painting beyond the selected boarder and in general creating havoc. Spend 3 hours trying to figure out what's going on and... nada. Any ideas?

[ukie]

Another try in different style

Northern lands.png

[Freehand 5.5]

I like that last one. How did you do that?

The black Typeface is nice. But I wouldn't kombine the 3D-effect with an outline.
The ocean labels dont need an outline. The white outline is kind of hard. An outline in the lightest color of the background would be more pleasant (e.g. light grey in the mountains, light green in the woods etc.).

[ukie]

I like that last one. How did you do that?

Ascension technique mostly but with couple of personal twists like higher and more defined mountain ranges and also colored climate zones.

The black Typeface is nice. But I wouldn't kombine the 3D-effect with an outline.
The ocean labels dont need an outline. The white outline is kind of hard. An outline in the lightest color of the background would be more pleasant (e.g. light grey in the mountains, light green in the woods etc.).

Good to know I'm still experimenting with labels and text curve.

[ukie]

Also a follow up question. Do you guys like these labels or not so much?