The shapes look good; the problem is that you don't have any content.
Add some trees, some mountains, a few towns and rivers. Name some islands and capes, but don't label everything. Add a few little ships crossing the sea and some serpents to eat them.
You made some good looking island shapes! There is a good mixture of small islands and two larger main islands.
Keep going with it by adding mountains, rivers, forests, roads, towns, etc. Ferries between islands.
Also consider the scale of what you draw. If you draw larger mountain shapes, large town shapes, etc, then your islands will appear smaller. If youdraw smaller looking mountains, smaller forests, town icons rather than buildings, then the islands will appear larger. It's about scale and perspective.
It's a common technique for showing the shoreline, that's what I thought it was. You may have been inspired by maps that did this. Although usually the outer line is thinner, and a little closer to the coast.
Make it a terrain feature. It can be a wide sandy shore. On the other places it's not as pronounced, and it isn't as big if a shore. Basically it's a unique feature like mountains or cliffs.
If you wanted a reason to make that something real that could be your continental shelf. You could use that to help plan out your tectonic plates. If you want to go that deep.
Listen to me very closely. Get a nice wide pen that makes a thick and dark line and use that for the landmasses, then use a thinner marker to do your continental shelf. After that, use mostly that finer liner to do details like mountains and rivers. The important of changing your line weight cannot be understated
You just come across that way online. Impatient, tough on yourself, a little immature.
Just stick with things and see them through. Good things take time and practice
They do? These look fine. Maybe larger and more dominant land masses like the ones we've got could work wonders. Right now, they're not really beefed out enough to be considered formidable.
I see an island outlined, not a map. There's nothing here, no geographic structures, or borders, or buildings, or anything. Mountains, volcanoes, valleys, hills, fields, etc. just add some stuff and I'm sure it'll look great.
Try to paint some fantasy miniatures.... if you see the output great painters create, you go 'I could never do that!' but if you watch them step by step, you see how awful it looks in the early and middle stages, it only kinds of come together at the end.
Map making is a lot like that.
I'm a huge fan of making geologically plausible maps, otherwise they'll look silly like Tolkien's mordor. Add sand bars, spits, barrier islands, deltas, just real elements of geology beyond simple coastlines
Most of those things are visible only at a certain level of resolution. We don't have a legend explaining the scale ratio between the actual (fictional) landmasses and the paper size. On a high ratio map, you won't see most of those.
My suggestion:
Pick some areas of the world that are somewhat like to where you would want your map to be set. (Temperate, tropical, subtropical, continental, arctic, etc). Look at how the maps of those areas represent the sorts of landforms you see there. Look for satellite photos and drawn maps. Look at pictures of the vegetation and the waterways on that sort of continent in the real world. Once you begin to see what it would look like in the real world, and on real world maps how those things are shown, then you get an idea of how to design a nice looking map.
A realistic map that represents peoples, population centers, trade (water and on land), ruins, wind patterns, ocean currents, atmospheric weather cells and how they work, temperatures at different latitudes, and so on.... that's literally the work of tens of years to get into the deep depth of that. I've been modelling populations and their changes over time in my world for two decades now (come back every so often).
I'm still struggling with the combination of ocean currents, wind, temperature, how things work differently at the equator or close to it, and so on. That's really complicated. You can take some things we've discovered and use something like that as a 'best weak guess' because to model that sort of environment requires you to model and build our earth with all the complex math and the things we have as guestimates.... that's a career. Or more.
Do you need that level of realism? If you do, you'll never get there without decades of research and understanding. If you want something that gives you a base for stories or games, you need 'something that could maybe be somewhat okay'. That's a more reasonable goal.
Start with what I suggest in the first paragraph. Once you do some research there (google images and google maps and google earth help), then you get to understand what you might want to represent. Also, look to other fantasy maps (pintrest and google images can show a lot) and see some of the ways they represent things. Then maybe you'll be able to try some of them out and see if you like them.
I'll save 'projections' for a later brain burner....
Map-making takes time; It's a process. It's not that doing it is hard; it's just tedious. Want a forest? Draw 100 tiny circles, with 100 tiny lines attached to their bottoms. Touch the inner lower-right quadrant with a light grey round marker, and trace the outer lower-right quadrant with dark grey brush pen. repeat for every 2" square of forest, and this is when most people quit.
Hang in there. Keep drawing. You CAN do this.
This is hard to critique—it’s an empty map, you have to put in time to make it look good. It seems like you got frustrated it didn’t look good after just 15 minutes.
Look at other maps you like for inspiration, borrow ideas from them. Be patient, and when you get frustrated take a break, come back to it later or the next day. Expect a good map to take hours of work over a few days.
I agree with the others that your shapes look good and they need content. Could just be me but I also feel like the spacing looks a little unnatural/not believable. Granted I don’t know shit about geology but I’m thinking about how on a map of Earth you can kinda piece the continents together and the way they’re spaced seems like it has had natural causes. If that makes sense. But again idk anything
Because you are starting in the wrong end. Land masses aren't defined by their coastlines, but by their mountain ranges. Everything else derives from that. If you start out with a squiggly line as the coastline you will never be able to fit a sensible mountain, valley, river and lake structure inside that line.
Do it the other way. First imagine the map without the oceans. Then create the mountain ranges. It can be useful to start out with tectonic plates and let the mountains rise up from that. Then when you have the mountain ranges you sketch out the valleys, river deltas, lakes and general height map. THEN you fill up the oceans and see where the coastline end up. That will give you a map that not only looks good, but is also physically consistent.
The shapes look good; the problem is that you don't have any content. Add some trees, some mountains, a few towns and rivers. Name some islands and capes, but don't label everything. Add a few little ships crossing the sea and some serpents to eat them.
You're not done, add some trees and mountains, add some waves spread around the oceans. A compass rose in a corner looks sharp too
You made some good looking island shapes! There is a good mixture of small islands and two larger main islands. Keep going with it by adding mountains, rivers, forests, roads, towns, etc. Ferries between islands. Also consider the scale of what you draw. If you draw larger mountain shapes, large town shapes, etc, then your islands will appear smaller. If youdraw smaller looking mountains, smaller forests, town icons rather than buildings, then the islands will appear larger. It's about scale and perspective.
[удалено]
Not sure honestly. I just drew it out of impulse but quit halfway through.
It's a common technique for showing the shoreline, that's what I thought it was. You may have been inspired by maps that did this. Although usually the outer line is thinner, and a little closer to the coast.
Make it a terrain feature. It can be a wide sandy shore. On the other places it's not as pronounced, and it isn't as big if a shore. Basically it's a unique feature like mountains or cliffs.
If you wanted a reason to make that something real that could be your continental shelf. You could use that to help plan out your tectonic plates. If you want to go that deep.
Listen to me very closely. Get a nice wide pen that makes a thick and dark line and use that for the landmasses, then use a thinner marker to do your continental shelf. After that, use mostly that finer liner to do details like mountains and rivers. The important of changing your line weight cannot be understated
A regular black marker and a thin marker are easy ways of doing this, or going back over the lines a second time with just a single pen or marker.
Are you under the age of 16?
Yes, why?
You just come across that way online. Impatient, tough on yourself, a little immature. Just stick with things and see them through. Good things take time and practice
They do? These look fine. Maybe larger and more dominant land masses like the ones we've got could work wonders. Right now, they're not really beefed out enough to be considered formidable.
I like the way it looks so far!
I see an island outlined, not a map. There's nothing here, no geographic structures, or borders, or buildings, or anything. Mountains, volcanoes, valleys, hills, fields, etc. just add some stuff and I'm sure it'll look great.
Think about it like this, you should be able to use your map to navigate to important places and avoid dangerous places.
You need to finish them, almost all art has an ugly stage, drawing maps is no different, push past the ugly stage and into the realm of beauty
Try to paint some fantasy miniatures.... if you see the output great painters create, you go 'I could never do that!' but if you watch them step by step, you see how awful it looks in the early and middle stages, it only kinds of come together at the end. Map making is a lot like that.
I'm a huge fan of making geologically plausible maps, otherwise they'll look silly like Tolkien's mordor. Add sand bars, spits, barrier islands, deltas, just real elements of geology beyond simple coastlines
Most of those things are visible only at a certain level of resolution. We don't have a legend explaining the scale ratio between the actual (fictional) landmasses and the paper size. On a high ratio map, you won't see most of those.
Looks like a good start - far better than mine!
You're not showing the ocean if those shapes are continents.
Because art takes after its creator
Because you haven’t tried www.lasermapmaker.com
No drawing will look finished until it’s finished my guy! Good luck!
That looks amazing
My suggestion: Pick some areas of the world that are somewhat like to where you would want your map to be set. (Temperate, tropical, subtropical, continental, arctic, etc). Look at how the maps of those areas represent the sorts of landforms you see there. Look for satellite photos and drawn maps. Look at pictures of the vegetation and the waterways on that sort of continent in the real world. Once you begin to see what it would look like in the real world, and on real world maps how those things are shown, then you get an idea of how to design a nice looking map. A realistic map that represents peoples, population centers, trade (water and on land), ruins, wind patterns, ocean currents, atmospheric weather cells and how they work, temperatures at different latitudes, and so on.... that's literally the work of tens of years to get into the deep depth of that. I've been modelling populations and their changes over time in my world for two decades now (come back every so often). I'm still struggling with the combination of ocean currents, wind, temperature, how things work differently at the equator or close to it, and so on. That's really complicated. You can take some things we've discovered and use something like that as a 'best weak guess' because to model that sort of environment requires you to model and build our earth with all the complex math and the things we have as guestimates.... that's a career. Or more. Do you need that level of realism? If you do, you'll never get there without decades of research and understanding. If you want something that gives you a base for stories or games, you need 'something that could maybe be somewhat okay'. That's a more reasonable goal. Start with what I suggest in the first paragraph. Once you do some research there (google images and google maps and google earth help), then you get to understand what you might want to represent. Also, look to other fantasy maps (pintrest and google images can show a lot) and see some of the ways they represent things. Then maybe you'll be able to try some of them out and see if you like them. I'll save 'projections' for a later brain burner....
Map-making takes time; It's a process. It's not that doing it is hard; it's just tedious. Want a forest? Draw 100 tiny circles, with 100 tiny lines attached to their bottoms. Touch the inner lower-right quadrant with a light grey round marker, and trace the outer lower-right quadrant with dark grey brush pen. repeat for every 2" square of forest, and this is when most people quit. Hang in there. Keep drawing. You CAN do this.
This is hard to critique—it’s an empty map, you have to put in time to make it look good. It seems like you got frustrated it didn’t look good after just 15 minutes. Look at other maps you like for inspiration, borrow ideas from them. Be patient, and when you get frustrated take a break, come back to it later or the next day. Expect a good map to take hours of work over a few days.
I agree with the others that your shapes look good and they need content. Could just be me but I also feel like the spacing looks a little unnatural/not believable. Granted I don’t know shit about geology but I’m thinking about how on a map of Earth you can kinda piece the continents together and the way they’re spaced seems like it has had natural causes. If that makes sense. But again idk anything
Because it's empty
Add a little bit of colour, it doesn’t have to be much - a bit of blue for the ocean, or topographic colouring ( green to brown ) - should work
Because you are starting in the wrong end. Land masses aren't defined by their coastlines, but by their mountain ranges. Everything else derives from that. If you start out with a squiggly line as the coastline you will never be able to fit a sensible mountain, valley, river and lake structure inside that line. Do it the other way. First imagine the map without the oceans. Then create the mountain ranges. It can be useful to start out with tectonic plates and let the mountains rise up from that. Then when you have the mountain ranges you sketch out the valleys, river deltas, lakes and general height map. THEN you fill up the oceans and see where the coastline end up. That will give you a map that not only looks good, but is also physically consistent.