Map Dabble

For your coastline, try the hard eraser and remove some of the jagged edges.

Looking very good. However, I didn't mean make your connection lines "not straight" I meant "not same directional". Keep them straight or curved, but not wave like. Change the direction of a few to mix it up a bit.

You are making quite a nice looking map with limited experience. This shows an artistic tendency and a willingness to learn. A fine example to other people who would like to make a D12 game map.

Even though I love the colours artistically and in contrast, they are too bright, try reducing the saturation a tad.

Yes, you're doing a very nice job In my opinion you have done in three days a better graphical job than many other risk-like sites' map creators.

You say that your intention is not to publish the map, but eventually you will, at that pace. Keep up the good work!

PS. Just a little thought... Why most invented names are monosyllabic? Is it a characteristic of English as a language? I think that a few are okay, but there are a lot in maps like Victron or this one.

Went around the borders with the eraser to get rid of most of the over jagged edges, which freed up some space for connection visibility. Got rid of the wavy connection lines, but not sure if I fixed the too linear problem. Haven't found a graphical solution to draw a specific angled straight diagonal line with out it looking pixelated. I also turned down the saturation on the islands too.
Thanks Psymon, I'm really just getting my creative fix. When I was a kid, I use to love art, I admired others and imitated them, but I was never satisfied with anything I did, it wasn't good enough to me and I always screwed it up, but I always enjoyed the process of it. I even do that with writing stories, I'll write pages of stuff and it will take up a lot of time, then I will just delete it and it's no big loss. The cartographers here inspire me to give it a go and it's good learning too. I'm just satisfied that I can do it and it's fun. One day I may submit a map.
 
Not much thought was put into the names, just a bash on the keyboards and mixing up vowels and consonants for most of the names. I would put more thought into it but I was keen to work on other things. I did change some to monosyllabic just for the names to fit on parts of the map, a bit of cheating .

For non-pixelated connection lines, click the line tool on the bottom-left of the image. Then click the highlighted Style drop-down list, then click dashes. Drag your mouse to create the connection line.

That's how I did it for my map. I used GIMP which is free but complicated; when push comes to shove, I'm not sure that Paint.net is quite up to the job of map creation, though I would love to be proven wrong!

gee thanks V98, seemed like simple thing to do but what a pain it was and the solution was right there. non-pixelated diagonal and curved lines yay.

You don't need to show them, but also download all the different colour circles and move them onto each region to see how they contrast to your island colours. I see a slight similarity in a few that might cause a camouflage. Keep changing the number on the following link to get all the colour circles. There are 2 oranges I believe, I can't remember which is which, but they are at least the same colour. http://www.dominating12.com//image/site/large_circles/6.png

I would make those connection lines a little thinner too as well as make them floating as much as the islands (same exact drop shadow). The same with the region names, otherwise you have different altitudes and the brain gets a little confused.

This floating effect might be a problem as all your territory labels are also over the sky area and are shown to be behind the land in distance from the eye. Normally these would be over the land and therefore perceived as the same distance from the eye.

Readability is very important too and single text colour with no outline or shadow usually blends too much giving no real distinction, so either put a thin white (1 px) Stroke on the labels or turn them light in colour with a black Stroke or a Shadow, but then we are back to the floating height, where the shadow will not be doing what you intended it to do, because it will be far away.

Just try to think "stay away from cheesy" with everything you try, until you find what looks aesthetically pleasing.
It is normally best to get depth perception right and true first and play about with the altitude afterwards, using the same height for everything thereafter.
The early tendencies are to make things bright & bold, but in a lot of artistic things 'less is more'.

(Edit) I would straighten the top left connection line to perfectly horizontal, because it is making the map look like it is rotated clockwise or sloping to the right. It is an optical illusion caused by 2 other points of reference (Top map edge & Title) being horizontal and the connection being sloped.

Could you add a couple of connections on the left side of the map? Currently the yellow-blue regions are a looong path and it bugs me a bit

Also the long "circular" connection wouldn't be well accepted... In general it's clearer to do straight connections.

aero's comments:
Thinner connection lines + shadowed
Straightened line top left connection
Region names shadowed + place names shadowed, not sure if that works for ya.
(other suggestions i tried looked worse, the way I was doing it anyways, I'll keep working on it)

psymon comments:
added connections blue / yellow territories
rid of over circled line right bottom still kept it curved however because of where the circle sits in Pekar.

Game color match.

I think you need to Pastel the colours a little still there are clashes in circle colour. The best way to test these is put only the similar colour circles on the relative territories, other colours won't clash anyway. It is still worth dropping them all on in your own time for your own piece of mind that they don't cause garish glows and optical illusions.

I am also not a fan of embossed texture on Maps. It is one from the 'cheesy' drawer! It makes it look false 3D.
I think it is enough 3D that you have floating islands.
You have to forgive me for this, but because you have chosen all islands for each territory and connection lines, every time I stand back and look at the map I see a Conquer Club map.

Here is the thing, I have hesitated in the pushing of techniques for the right reasons. This is because you are adamant that this is a practise tool, but what better place than to practise the correct and absolutely necessary technique which you will eventually need in order to make a map that fits into the D12 repertoire and this is borders & territory dividers?

I really think you could step backwards with your land and create joined territories with drawn dividers.

I don't know what tools paint.net has, but in Photoshop I use a hard brush set to size 2 pixels (custom to the map size), I zoom in to my map so that I am working on large movements to create a small kink and this eliminates the fuzziness / shakiness on lines and I keep zooming in and out to work and check the movement. Use a size 3 for region borders and coastlines. So you end up with thick lines for borders and thin lines for dividers. If you want each territory to be a slightly different (unique) colour, you can paint bucket fill inside a marquee of the gaps of each territory with the chosen colour on a new layer for each.
Everyone seems to have their own preferred method for borders and dividers but basically, in most cases, your borders & dividers should be joined and on one separate layer to everything else and placed above the land layers & texture layers. You can still use the Stroke tool on the land even though you have a hand drawn coastline border, it will embolden the coastline further and if too much you can decrease the opacity of the Stroke.

It doesn't hurt to have duplicate layers and sometimes this helps when you need something to be bolder, sharper or opaque.

It is up to you now if you fancy making islands with internal territories?!

Ok, let's give an alternative... Psymon when bordering territories uses in general 1px brush, and draws the lines in one brushing. Then duplicates the layer and applies a gaussian blur of 0.5 points (in pdn of 1pt) to reduce jaggedness. When bordering regions I use either the same method or 2px brush and generally nothing else. Balkan has duplicated 3px border for regions and coastlines if I remember well. I use different layers for territory, region and outer borders and coastlines, because it's easier to correct the junctions.

In general I apply more detail to borders than aero (I'd say than everyone else) so thinner borders work better.

Thanks Psymon.
Yes, as he said, there are other ways to draw outlines, borders and territory dividers. I also use the method on separate layers that Psymon describes above as well as lots of other methods that I have discovered over years.
Just to make life easy for you for now, I have made an Outlines, Borders & Territory Dividers Tutorial, using the simple method I first described. As you will see from the tutorial, there is the ability to be quite precise and have finesse if you wish to make your map more beautiful. Sometimes you have to make it look good even when you are at the lowest possible size available, such as the dividers in Italia at brush size 1.
Tutorial: http://www.dominating12.com/forum/?cmd=topic&id=2007

awesome tutorial bro, that helps a bunch, getting an online course happening here, nice.

Messed around with the s.e asia map some more adding more territories (65 total). Still finding the borders a pain.
Think I got the color scheme working and not conflicting with the circles things. I think with all these territories / islands, there would be some sort of special play..like lots of ports, probably between oceans/seas. Probably would help to dumb down the many line connections. Next play around will have NO islands!

This could make a nice map!! However, you need to remember that all maps on this site are 1024pixels wide - this one is too wide (I think), and the territory circles may not fit easily on a smaller map.

"HD maps are also an option at 1366 pixels wide but HD maps tend to get played less because they don't fit well on laptop screens. A screen resolution of at least 1600 x 900 is needed to properly display an HD map. If you want your map to be popular then stick to the standard size."

Yeah I went with this HD size mentioned in the Vexers Map making guide, so I could fit those extra territories in, I hadn't resized it down again to see how it would look, I may try that actually