@jslayton - thank you very much. A very useful pair of images, since they also contained things I knew the size of - vehicles. It is plain to me that what I thought of as tree sized plants are really no larger than a temperate zone shrub. My mother, for instance, has things in her garden she calls 'shrubs' that grow taller than the average Joshua tree. Still a useful map symbol, though, since that whole desert area seems to be covered in nothing but Joshua trees and dry grasses. Thanks also for comments about the saguaro. I had been toying with the idea of adjusting them a little - particularly the really big one. They are a bit on the fat side.

@Quenten - Thanks. I realise the gums are a vast family and vary hugely in size. Not all of them have white bark either! The range you gave is enormous - the largest being twice as tall as the smallest. I think, though, that I am going to have to keep the size variation down to a much smaller range, or they will look raggedy rather than making a reasonable attempt at graceful, in a map where most other types of vegetation varies only by about 10 feet at most between individual trees. The gums look small compared to the palms, but the palms themselves are bigger than the gums. The tallest palms in the world are Columbian wax palms, which can reach 200ft. Again - palms can also be as short as a man when mature, so it's really difficult to know how big to make the different types of trees relative to one another. If it is any comfort the gums are taller than the regular deciduous trees.

@mike robel - Thanks - interesting information. The saguaro can reach 60ft, but the ones I've drawn could probably be a tad smaller than they are. It may well be that once I have shrunk the saguaro and Joshua trees down a bit to more like half the size of all the other trees everything else will look far more reasonable. After all, I don't think anyone is going to need to make a dense forest of saguaro or joshua trees any time soon. They are more likely to just be dotted around to indicate 'desert'.

...

Overall, I think Joe has the right of it in his first paragraph. These are symbols. The fact that all the trees look a bit large beside the mountain is pretty normal in overland fantasy maps. That is down to the need to be able to recognise the different representative types of tree - symbols that say what they are, rather than being totally accurate but otherwise illegible dots in various different shades of green and brown. Meanwhile, the mountains can't be too large, or there would be no room for anything else in the map.

I will play with the relative scaling between the vegetation types a little - make the desert flora a shade smaller, but I won't be able to go too far with it, since the images are already pretty pixelated at the scale they are.

Thanks everyone! ?

You have a gallery here to show of your images too :)

Wow! Thanks :)

I think that all depends on what PF want to do. So for now I will finish part 2 - hopefully right on time ;)

Oh cool!

So if I do 3 of each you'd all be happy?

@jmabbott Ralf will be doing a live stream based on the isometric version of this style tomorrow if you want to come and join in. I have posted this in your thread for your convenience, since you asked specially, but I will also start a thread for it in the main forum.

Weird, as in not right at all - the resulting symbol doesn't look like anything but a mess.

I think it was a brilliant idea, and I can see how it would halve the time taken to do a Ferraris Style map, maybe even more than that. In fact, if I could only lay my hands on that 25 hour day I had somewhere lying around this place I'd have a go myself :)

I use these two keys a lot:

SHIFT - hold down SHIFT to select more than one by clicking each one in succession while holding the key.

CTRL - same as SHIFT, but it allows you to deselect individual items from the selection.

I worked for BAE Systems once for about 6 weeks as a temp on the reception desk at our local office! LOL!

A far cry from what you get up to though ;)

Thanks for sharing your story :D

5 of each?

I'm going to try and make them open at the top so they will have whatever fill you put them on.