Well, aside from the colour, it doesn't really have anything in common with Viper's Bugloss (which is what we call that weed).

Heath is a mixture of Erica and Calluna species (heathers), Ulex (gorses) and lots of grasses and other plant species all mixed in together. Its a naturally evolved ecosystem that supports a large number of increasingly rare fauna in the British Isles, including the the Silver-Studded Blue...

...a butterfly that has Protected status here in the UK. 'Heath' is the lowland cousin of the Scottish moors. Much of Wimbledon Common once used to be a heathland.

It's not a sterile monoculture of a single invasive weed.

That's good :)

The walls and towers could be done the same way as the roads but you have chosen to go with symbols, which is fine.

It's looking really great. You're rapidly becoming a really good mapper :)

Hello Linn :)

That sounds quite fascinating. I would love to read an introduction thread by you!

The last time I ever had the critique of an art tutor (about 35 years ago) I was told that my style wasn't fashionable, and that I wouldn't get onto a degree course. He was quite right as it turned out, so all I have to show for that time in my life is a Foundation Diploma in Fine Art. I do landscape paintings - or at least I used to in the old days. They just weren't abstract enough for contemporary taste and didn't sell as well as all those pink, orange, blue and viridian expressions I saw in the window.

So I took an office job and laid all those things to one side until very recently, when I became involved with fantasy mapping art. I've done the digital version of drawing my own maps from scratch, but only ever one map on real paper using real pencils. It turned into more of a landscape than a map. Well, that was no surprise given my background.

Things happened in my life at that point and I drew my horns in quite a bit. I also discovered at that time the great pleasure of producing assets for other people to use in their maps, and eventually became far more interested in doing that than in drawing maps for myself.

I wouldn't claim to know very much about fantasy mapping styles because there is just so much to consider beyond the drawing itself, but I have worked out that maps differ from paintings in that the elements are more symbolic than real at this scale. The example map represents 1000 x 800 miles, which means that the volcanoes are gigantic, and the mountains themselves are super massive beyond that. In a non-photorealistic style it is not the scale of the elements that is important as much as the clarity - the ease of identification of each thing. Hence everything is several hundred times bigger than it would be if it was drawn actual size, and each tree might represent a whole woodland.

However, and having explained my personal take on scale and symbolisation, I can see that the ash clouds may be too large relative to the rest of the volcano, and also that this slightly discomforting distortion isn't helped by them being less cartoony than the rest of the elements. I look at them again, now, and I can see something that is neither cartoon nor photorealistic but a rather distracting hybrid of the two things.

Thank you for helping me to work this out and get it straight in my head. I think I will probably reduce the size of the ash clouds a bit and make them more cartoony, but I will leave that until I have done a draft version of the full set so I can smooth out the bumps all in one go.

And also, thank you very much for the reference material. I have bookmarked those pages for personal interest, since I currently have something of a fascination with volcanoes :)

Sadly, you can't reverse the import directly. When you export a map to CC3 you lose all the 2.5D height information, so the best you can do is use the outline as a pattern overlay to re-sculpt your island a little larger than it was before

Alternatively, you can zoom in to the island and export that alone as a CC3 map. FT3 will export whatever is visible in it's window at the time of export and nothing more. It should give you a much higher resolution CC3 map of the island.