Exaggerated Relief Map of Iceland

[UnstableGunEnthusiast]

Well whaddya know, I remembered the password to this account!

In all seriousness, its been a couple years since I've posted here. Hell, its been a couple of years since I made a map I'm sorta happy with. I've been working on this for a couple of months now, trying to nail down nail down the exact process behind making exaggerated relief maps, with an artistic flair to it. Something that's halfway accurate, while at the same time being something that you could put up on the wall.
I used qgis for the geodata and elevation data, blender to render it in 3D. Then I took all of that, tossed it into photoshop, and went ham on it.


The png ended up being a whopping 44 MB, and I don't have enough experience with this stuff to know whether that's expected, or I messed up somehow. Hell, just to upload the whole image, I had to run it through a png compresser, then convert it to jprg and run it through the compresser again. I don't even want to imagine what its done to the quality of the final image... ah well, c'est la vie.

This marks the absolute first time I've ever attended digital cartography (and the first time I've used qgis and blender), so I'm very new to all of this. Any and all critique shall be richly rewarded, as I'm planning on taking this further.

Goes without saying, I need to start sharpening my skills on photoshop, too. I have no clue how to draw in it... I'll figure it out, I'm sure xD

I'm attaching a few cropped sections of the map.









I tell you what though, it feels good to be back.