Mosaic tile styled map

[pyrandon]

Hello, friends:

Here's my latest Photoshop test run: an emulation of a mosaic map affixed to the wall of some ancient ruin. Although my composition is fairly weak here, I do see a lot of potential for this style, far beyond this quick test drive.

Take care,

[NeonKnight]

I like it a lot. How did you do it?

[Jharviss]

This is absolutely brilliant. You simply must let us in on your secret. I would make one of these in a heartbeat.

[ravells]

You did that with a filter???

We demand a tutorial!! It's absolutely beautiful! I would love to use something like that as a texture for a 3d model!

Ravs

[pyrandon]

You did that with a filter???

No, actually I did it with no filter at all: this is using 1) a custom brush, 2) stroking work paths, and 3) layer styles. Some of the fancy-shmancy finishing touches were created by doubling up end-layers (such as a Multiply layer for depth and a light rendered layer for the upper-left lighting).

We demand a tutorial!!

Hahaha--no problem, I can whip that up. I'll post in in the coming days/week.

Neon, Jharviss, everyone: I'm glad it's inspired you!

[AidyBaby]

That is fantastic. I'm soooo looking forward to the tut.

[Wordman]

(Arg. Originally posted this to the wrong thread.)

Extremely cool. I recently needed a similar mosaic style in one of my maps. My results weren't anywhere near as realistic looking, but was a lot less work (but more money). It didn't turn out that badly, but not as sweet as your technique. I used the Xenofex mosaic filter, with a lot of tweaking of the underlying image (pre-filter) to get the filter to do what I wanted.

I do wonder if your technique might be easier to accomplish in Illustrator instead of Photoshop.

[pyrandon]

Wordman: PS actually has a built-in mosaic filter, of course, but much as your map the results are very "canned"--meaning extremely lovely in complexity, but lacking human elements and verisimilitude. (You map, by the way is very, very interesting--I absolutely love the tiling of the oceans and have already made up my mind to steal that from you. Yoink!)

I have Illustrator, but have never even opened it, so I cannot say if this technique would be easier there. I imagine you are right, since up until the final steps it really is a vector map. If anyone else knows the program, I would love to see them create tiles like I would have had before adding the layer styles, etc., so this could be imported into PS for rendering, etc.

[Avulsion]

Although I know PS fairly well, I don't have access to it currently. So I tried out your tutorial in gimp and wow... it is a totally different program and so far, looks very gimped.

I sorta figured out how to make the box-like airbrush shape, but I don't see any options to make it jitter in transparency or have the directional brushing (so that it looks more like a snake and not like a bunch of boxy stamps sprayed on a page). If any gimp pros could show me the light, I'd be very appreciative.

If there is any other way to make this mosaic type map, I will do just about anything! It's just too awesome to pass up!

(you can move this to your tut thread if you feel like it)

[pyrandon]

I wonder if RobA or another of our Master Gimpophiles could give soem suggestions on Gimpinizing it--I'm sorry to say I know nothing about it. I would love to see those results too; as you can see form my PS tutorial, it's nothing all that amazingly complex, so I assume you could do it in that program.