Rol - My first world creation

[Grimrskegg]

Heya folks!

This is my fourth attempt at making a post (I'm so scared of asking stupid questions and all my questions sound stupid in my head). This is a basic map I made with pre-created assets, brushes and textures. So 100% not my artwork. I want to keep this as an end goal of where I want to reach by the end of this map-making journey.

What I want to know as I start is :

- are my placements of the geographic features correct? any of them look unnatural or out of place?
- am I making any big mistakes in laying out the land?
- anything I need to know when trying to follow an art-style such as this one?
- which one is a better purchase for a complete beginner for easier learning? a drawing tablet / a display tablet

How I plan to work :

- I want to draw the entire map instead of making brushes for myself. I made brushes following the wonderful 'Easy maps in GIMP' tutorial here. It was fun and I learnt how to use GIMP interface a bit. But it did not feel right to me.
- The reference map colors are a good fit for what I had in mind
- Till I get my tablet situation sorted, I plan to draw on paper, scan it and then do modifications to it slowly (Possibly dumb idea )

Thank you for reading all that. If this is too bland or weird, I apologize. Just wanted to start a thread and post updates as I started working on this new avenue.

[Spiderheart]

Firstly, I would say a display tablet is best for a beginner, because it feels more like a piece of paper, so the learning curve is smaller. I know they're more expensive, but XP Pen and Huion are brands that have been recommended to me by the animation professor at my school.

Secondly, the first thing to know is that mountains always follow the line of a tectonic plate. They never intersect or meet at angles, therefore (Tolkien's map always drove me bonkers because of this).

Rivers don't intersect either--when two rivers meet up, they join together. And I'm not from a place with rivers (I'm from the desert) so I had to have someone tell me that rivers also never split apart, they start in mountains all tiny and gradually join together into bigger and bigger rivers until they drain into the sea or a lake.

You've placed all your settlements wonderfully--people settle by rivers and other sources of water is a good rule of thumb, because you can move food around but you can't move the water around.

I'm not sure if I'm reading this right, but the orangey parts are deserts right? Deserts tend to develop on the 'rain shadow' side of a mountain range, and the other side of those mountains tends to be foresty. Wetland (also called: swamp, bog, fen, marsh, bayou--these all mean slightly different kinds of wetland) tends to show up in flat land at the end of a river, such as the Mississippi delta.

(If you're interested in more details on these different habitats let me know--I am a big ol' eco-system nerd I loooooove infodumping about that stuff!)

This is a great first map--you've paid attention to all the right elements and made sure they're all here, that's great! And they're all put together very thoughtfully too.

[OldSkoolRPG]

Did you do this with Inkarnate? You are getting far better results than I ever accomplish lol. Looks awesome.

[Grimrskegg]

Wow, I'm slow. And this is barely anything. But I got the outline complete now.

[Grimrskegg]

Did you do this with Inkarnate? You are getting far better results than I ever accomplish lol. Looks awesome.

Yes, I did! It helped me get an overall idea of what I had in mind. I had so much difficulty using the brush tool there. And thank you very much for your kind words.

[Grimrskegg]

Firstly, I would say a display tablet is best for a beginner, because it feels more like a piece of paper, so the learning curve is smaller. I know they're more expensive, but XP Pen and Huion are brands that have been recommended to me by the animation professor at my school.

Secondly, the first thing to know is that mountains always follow the line of a tectonic plate. They never intersect or meet at angles, therefore (Tolkien's map always drove me bonkers because of this).

Rivers don't intersect either--when two rivers meet up, they join together. And I'm not from a place with rivers (I'm from the desert) so I had to have someone tell me that rivers also never split apart, they start in mountains all tiny and gradually join together into bigger and bigger rivers until they drain into the sea or a lake.

You've placed all your settlements wonderfully--people settle by rivers and other sources of water is a good rule of thumb, because you can move food around but you can't move the water around.

I'm not sure if I'm reading this right, but the orangey parts are deserts right? Deserts tend to develop on the 'rain shadow' side of a mountain range, and the other side of those mountains tends to be foresty. Wetland (also called: swamp, bog, fen, marsh, bayou--these all mean slightly different kinds of wetland) tends to show up in flat land at the end of a river, such as the Mississippi delta.

(If you're interested in more details on these different habitats let me know--I am a big ol' eco-system nerd I loooooove infodumping about that stuff!)

This is a great first map--you've paid attention to all the right elements and made sure they're all here, that's great! And they're all put together very thoughtfully too.

Thank you very much for your response! I missed the notification for the responses completely for some reason.

Yes, I learnt about some of the points you mentioned pretty recently. So, some changes would be made on the placement of the desert land. I am learning the natural formation of dry lands and wet lands. As for the couple rivers that look like they are intersecting, those are mistakes because I am not very used to brushes and drawing at all. I apologize for those. The two places where the rivers seem like they split are meant to be artificially created with dams. My placeholder symbols for dams are not the best.

Also, I did went and got myself a nice Huion display tablet. I still suck at doing much. xD But it is fun to spend a couple hours every night and do something. It has turned into a good exercise to just relax and try to draw something.