River Refining + Mountain Range Design

I'm continuing to build out my riparian system for Embla. I've also been working a lot on a Conlang/naming language, which has got me really excited about putting more things on the map! I was worried my previous rivers weren't at a realistic scale or pattern for the type of mountain range I had in mind. I have been looking on OpenTopo map for a lot of mountain range inspiration! Something I have found extremely helpful is to practice tracing real mountain ranges & river systems on Inkscape. Using the regular pencil tool, trace a rough line along the highest ridges of a small portion of a range. I color this red for contrast, then start in blue to color the rivers/streams. After doing this a couple times, it's given me a much better feel for how the rivers actually look in the type of range I want to create in west-central Embla. Here's what I have ended up with:


The greyed out background is the currently uploaded river system. Blue is new rivers, red are the peaks/ridges of the range. I think this will be really helpful in adding peaks later on and giving me ideas for where to place trails, ski resorts, and tiny mountain towns. I'd like to make it clear I did not copy this straight from OpenTopo map, but used the tracing as practice for drawing original rivers/ridges. I'll post about the Conlang progress soon! 

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