Ricko gave me some great tips -- fixing the waterfall in the first image (it needed to be more in the foreground), rotating some of the elven buildings to face the road, and adding trees to conceal where terrain/symbols connect. I hope I found all of the spots that needed trees! Here are my adjustments:

When I was ready to revisit the idea with the Mike Schley style, I took inspiration from Ricko Hasche's gorgeous maps that combine Mike Schley's Overland style with elements from the Cities of Schley Isometric style. I kept thinking about gold and leprechauns. Who else covets gold? Dragons, of course! So this rather large overland map has the rainbow ending on a dragon's nest with her golden egg. (Originally it was going to be a gold dragon, but the red one popped on the screen better.)

I will post some zoomed-in versions in my galleries.

Although I was pleased overall, it doesn't have the impact that Ricko Hasche's gorgeous maps do. I decided to make another attempt, this time with a much smaller area and going vertical. I'm much happier with this next attempt, although I need a ton more practice to get mine looking a fraction as nice as Ricko's.

I had a silly idea of doing a whimsical map or scene with leprechauns and pots of gold for St. Patrick's Day. But I didn't know how to incorporate a leprechaun, and that got me started down another path about a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

I started one in the Cities of Schley style, with the rainbow ending on an island with a chest of gold, but it was terrible. Scrapped that (but later went back to the concept) and ended up doing one in the more photorealistic Forest Trails style. The rainbow ends at a henge, landing on a green gemstone.

Then I did a tweak to it, having it end on a runestone instead:

Once I was happy with how the rainbow itself turned out, I was ready to revisit the project in the Mike Schley style......

I have been experimenting with three different approaches of taking a portion of a world designed in Fractal Terrains and then expanded upon in CC3+. All three of these experiments export the same view in FT.

The portion of the world I practiced on is an equatorial island nation called the Republic of Lumadair. The coastline is 10,099 miles long, with a length of about 2,000 miles long, depending where you measure from. (For reference, Australia has a mainland coastline (excluding islands) of 22,258 miles.)

Here's what it looks like from Fractal Terrains:

Approach 1: Parchment Maps

As previewed in a separate thread, this was my attempt to render it in the Parchment Maps style from the February annual using a technique that Ralf demonstrated in this video. It's scant on details -- the kind of map my players might find in old ruins somewhere giving them a clue where to continue their adventures.

Approach 2: Jerion Shading

This approach, also previewed in another thread, using the technique in this demo from Ralf to take the Jerion style and add beveling effects to some of the contours to create shading effects. I added cities and major towns (and a few magical places) but only named the major bodies of water and the two close continents.

Approach 3: Mike Schley Style

This approach exports the same land mass into the Schley style (which I only recently discovered was an option in FT), then added some contours brought in from the Jerion style. This is the slowest-to-render map I've ever done due to some techniques (and lessons learned) that I will describe later in this thread.

I just love the versality here -- I can have identical coastlines for all three maps, but they all have different looks and vibes.

Realized I didn't have any stains or scum, so added a bit. Really love how this template includes so many different effects options for adjusting the coloring.