Fraedhron Map

[LordCartoart]

This is a map I made digitally, in hand drawn antique style. I'm only just starting to make digital maps, so critique would be preferred.

[Mouse]

That's a great first try, LC

I'm not an expert in hand drawn digital, since I tend to use Campaign Cartographer and have only recently ventured into the confusing domain of GIMP, but I think I would be right in suggesting that you could use a much larger image size so that the lines were not so pixelated - especially around the coastline.

It might also be worth hand drawing the 'ripples' around the coast as faint suggestions, rather than doing them automatically as solid lines.

EDIT: I've repped you too recently to be able to rep you again so soon!

[kacey]

I think overall the map looks pretty good, but the lines are way too pixelated, what size did you choose for this map?

And since you're asking for critique, it's obvious that you used the same tree over, and over, maybe try varying the size, and shape just a touch, also they seem slightly tipped to the right.

I actually don't mind the generated water lines, I think they suite this style it's just the pixelation that's bugging me in those, and maybe turn down the opacity a touch. I find it helpfull when doing this type of water lines to give it just a slight blur, not too much just like 1 or 2 pixels can help it look less digital.

The other thing that I think would improve this greatly would be keeping you're lines somewhat consistent, the mountains are sort of being overshadowed by the coast, and trees right now, and I think that making the mountain outlines more prominent or the coast and trees less it would make a big difference and help balance things out.

One more thing is you have lines showing through you're text, I find this really distracting, I think it would look better if you removed the stuff that's showing through just under the text, not whole objects just the bits that are under the words, it would make it look allot cleaner, and more polished in my opinion.

Aside from that I like the map, and I like the texture, and colours. I know you normally draw you're maps by hand so this must be a transition for you, but having seen you're other work I think you'll do just fine once you're used to doing things digitally... You're hand drawn maps are so nice I'm excited to see you progress digitally, I'm sure you'll catch on pretty quick, you have a good start here.

[LordCartoart]

Thanks Mouse and Kacey! Yeah, I don't know why I didn't make the map bigger, I had every opportunity to do so when I made the black and white outline. The map is 1100x850 px. I chose the way I did the ripples because it was easy, and I knew that some did it that way and some did not. I was also lazy with the trees. I probably should have set the trees as a brush and set the dynamics to size pressure, and made a couple more kinds of trees.

Thanks!

[Mouse]

I'm currently making tree symbols in files that are 2000 pi square. Admittedly these will be reduced to about 500 pi square before they get used in any maps, but I would think a map with reasonable resolution would probably be at least 6-8000 pi, maybe more than that.

The GIMP version of the city district I'm currently working on is over 10,000 pi on its longest side, and about 9000 pi on its shortest.

[LordCartoart]

Wow, so I should really scale up then?

[Mouse]

The only thing you have to watch out for is how well your system manages maps of that size. I have a laptop with just 4 GB RAM (very tiny in comparison to some of the systems in use by other members), but I get around this by using layers that are only as big as I need them to be. For example, if I have a 10,000 pi square map, that doesn't mean the layer I have the river on needs to be any bigger than the width and breadth of the river

That way I've been able to have as many as 40 layers on a map that size, despite the limitations of my hardware