Found this on the web:
MAPMAKING
Main types of land images: Mountains, Rivers, Hills, Steppes, Forests, Valleys, Grasslands, Swamps, Desert.
Rivers are:
• Long. They can travel quite a ways in their lifetime.
• Thin.
• Winding. Rivers twist and turn in an unpredictable way. (Not truly unpredictable, but to the layman a mystery.)
• Connected to other water. Exception: mountain run-off rivers that go into the middle of a lowland and stop.
• Uniform. Rivers never criss-cross each other.
• Surrounded by life. If a river is in a fertile soil, if there is no drought or plague of flora, plants will be there.
How rivers form: from rain, floods, tsunami's, etc. The strata determines how the river will look and act.
Rocky - The river will not twist so much, and will be narrow and quick.
Sandy - The river will be shallow and wide, and will turn frequently.
Muddy - Look for a slow, twisting river that is shallow at the edges and deep in the channel.
Gravel - flow is swift and shallow, with deep holes at the turns in the riverbed. Gravel bars are at larger turns.
How rivers act: Rivers eat away the land around them at an unpredictable pace. Some rivers grow into huge behemoths very quickly, and then fade when their source disappears. Other, smaller rivers have no flood plain.
Rivers flow down. Rivers flow into the sea, not out of it.
Small rivers connect to form larger rivers, which flow to the sea or die out.
Rivers are like trees, with branches and a trunk.
Rivers twist with the land, and have large, central turns that contain the smaller, precise twists.
Rivers get larger when another "branch" joins in. Remember, the river now has that much extra water to carry.
When rivers branch off, the ground near the partition tends to be waterlogged aka--swampland!
Mountains occur in long, thin chains, they curve and wind about. Mountains provide depth and elevation within a map. Without them, your land would be a plain interrupted by forests and the occasional river or swamp. If you look at a map closely, the land appears 'higher' between two closely spaced mountain chains than it does between two widely spaced ranges. You can use this illusion to generate the effect of highlands in your map, a feature that should not be overlooked.
Practicing a few. Refer to the maps that you were using to study the effects of style. What types of mountains are used and where? How does the climate affect the ranges? How are they arranged? Study the shading effects of the mountains and practice it for a while. Most tend to shade mountains on the left side, leaving a lighter right hand view.
Swamps are formed in soft, low lying ground near to a source of ample water. That source may be the ocean, a lake, a river, or even an aquifer. They tend to be small and compact. Swamps are of each extreme in the time that they exist: a swamp with a good water source and little disturbance can exist longer than a mountain range. Swamps are earthquake resistant, and only the greatest of tremors will cause a serious disturbance. Yet when a swamp dries up, it is rapidly swallowed up by the surrounding landscape. You might consider creating separate maps for separate times, to distinguish the fluctuation of landscapes.
Dead swamps are the ideal setting for an ethereal encounter, or just a spooky place to venture through. A live swamp's vegetation would most likely be the remnants of a forest of some native tree, with about three feet of stagnant, still water covering about five feet of slippery, thick mud. This mud would arise in clumps to form islands, which would be carpeted by a form of grass or moss, populated by withered shrubs or reeds. Any swamp can have separate vegetation, and none of the above mentioned is mandatory.
A live swamp must be close to some form of water. If you choose to create a dead swamp, you can place it anywhere that of old had a water source. Swamps placed in a river delta will be broken into separate sections by strong currents, and will be more likely to have quicksand than any other. Quicksand is caused by the irregular flow of water beneath the surface of the swamp, and the channels of a broken river provide plenty of these. Remember that cities cannot be built within a swamp, lest they burn down, fall over, and then sink into the swamp.
The concept of balance: keeping your picture proportional to the opposite side, with no place being 'weightier' than another. You have to have places where there is nothing, and yet you need places where the concentration of image is the greatest. All maps need open, flat places and dark, clustered images. To avoid the clumping of each I recommend long mountain chains and rivers and many small clusters of images as though they were netted together into one big mesh. Try to spread that mesh so that the holes on it are of uniform size and shading.
Overview is where the map is seen from: usually from high above. Why take overview seriously? Because with overview comes distance, size, and shading.
The distance part of it is fairly obvious. The higher up you seem to be, the greater the distance it is between any two given points on the paper. Keep this in mind when deciding how big your land is. If you want to show 18,000 miles worth of land on one paper, you're going to have to draw very small. If you want to show one mile, however, your images should be larger.
Dead space
Ah, dead space, the scourge of cartographers everywhere. What to do with dead space? Usually you would want to leave it alone. Sometimes, though, you need something there to achieve balance. I recommend a compass rose or a distance gauge to fill in some of the larger spaces. Vary the types of images you use to the need for balance; you do not want to upset the balance in just the opposite way by filling in too much!
