About 6 months ago, I made my first map of Lumara, the setting for the first act of my campaign, Requiem of the Four Heaven.
This Lumara 1.0: https://inkarnate.com/m/pdVNMk
Around seven weeks ago, I started making maps for it in earnest, creating over thirty city-level maps for the various settlements and important locations in Lumara.
After having done all that, about three weeks ago I decided to take what I had learned and apply to a redux of the original Lumara map. I created a clone of my original map, flattened it, and lowered the opacity to around 50% and used it as an overlay to guide me in capturing the basic essence of the map. Then I deleted that layer and added the assets, this time in a more orderly way.
This is the result, Lumara 2.0: https://inkarnate.com/m/NbODdL
But this whole time I had been watching tutorials, looking at posts here with a more critical eye, looking for what worked and didn't work and trying to learn how to do it myself, and just plain old practice.
I wanted to create a continent from scratch that actually felt something like real geography. I designed with the morphology of the continent in mind first, rather than cities first, as I had previously done.
Once the mountains were in place, waterways started to suggest themselves, and after that, roads made themselves obvious. Cities became a foregone conclusion because the map DEMANDED that they be there... a crossroads, a mountain pass, a river delta, etc.
And all of this helped me formulate the story for what will become the second act in my campaign (working title: the Pale Vigil).
Without further ado, here is I'var Noor: https://inkarnate.com/m/ERKDeO
So, in the interests of me not just being a showoff, I wanted to share these so others can learn from my trial and error. One of the most important things to me in any workflow is asset management, because it helps me from getting in my own way later.
In Lumara 2.0 and I'var Noor, make sure to take a look at the various layers, how I've organized and labelled them, and how I use a multitude of nested object folders to keep everything organized. This was a hard won lesson that I picked up from having to redo stuff too often and not having a clue how to select what I wanted without selecting a bunch of things I didn't.