A slightly embarrassed cry for help

[torstan]

Hi all. I'm a little bit stuck and could really do with a hand. I'm doing a large scale mediaeval-esque world map and it needs to have a border. Now my maps don't generally do borders so I've gone with a simple double line, thin outer, thick inner. However I tried the same to delineate the legend and was told in no uncertain terms that the legend at least had to be fancier than that. So I'd welcome any thoughts or example of legends people can pull together. Also, if anyone can point me at some good illuminated border corners I'd be enormously grateful. I know they're out there, it's just that my Googling has got me precisely nowhere.

Thanks, as always, in advance and rep to any and all who can help out.

[Redrobes]

That liams old books link can throw a few of those borders up. If it needs to be in real high res then it might have to be vectorized first. I think it was Ravs that said about that book shop in London that sells public domain art which is really cool too.

See if anything pops up here
http://www.fromoldbooks.org/

i.e:
http://www.fromoldbooks.org/Search/?...&submit=Search

[torstan]

That right there? That would be you being a star. Thank you very much.

All further tips and help much appreciated, but that's given me a nice chunk of stuff to get started with.

[Steel General]

Didn't look at the links RR provided, but you could always go with some thing like a coat of arms, etc. Though that might be better for the cartouche *shrugs*

[Ascension]

I always look for Baroque art and Edwardian art - lots of flourishes and swirly bits...Baroque has more of a nature, feathers, and seashells look. I always start at the bookstore to see what they have...usually a bunch of clip art books for about 10 bucks. You could talk to Coyotemax...he does a lot of border work. I'd also recommend the Adobe Exchange, I got a lot of stuff from there in the Brushes category and Custom Shapes category...but I haven't been there in years.

[Coyotemax]

To be honest, most of my border work is custom done, either relying on old pieces of my own or putting them together on the fly. I do a lot of looking through old maps for inspiration of course. I tend to save a lot of things from Google searches (i think my RightClickSaveAs is such an ingrained habit I don't realize I'm doing it half the time..) for future inspiration as well. And if a site seems to have multiple results that could come in handy in the future, I'll mark it as a favourite.

The ones that aren't, and the ones that are inspired by, usually come from google searches. I don't recall all of the terms I've ever used, but a few good ones are
Border (but you get a lot of modern day maps showing Russia and such)
vector border
antique map
old map
cartouche
ornate

things like that. Adding vector to any search seems to give interesting results too.
Another thing I do a lot of is setting the advanced search options to Large images and Line Art. I just keep rightclicking and open in new tab anything that remotely catches my eye as being useful for what I'm working on right then, until i have between 10 and 15 results. once the results become very few and far between, I keep looking, determined to find just one more (that one more is often the one I end up working with, I find). Though I've also maxed out the search results on more than one occasion - Google won't show more than 1000 results in total, heh.

If you need more specific assistance I'd be happy to, just drop me a PM, though it looks like you've already been directed to one of my typical sources

[Ascension]

If you'd like, I can see what I have, package it up into a zip and post it here...probably over the weekend. Some I have screenshots for (I try to make an image file for all brush sets and shape sets) but some I don't (gotten lazy).

[torstan]

Thanks guys. Vintage was clearly the term I was missing in my search. That's turned up a wealth of images.

A list of good sites for these and packs people have found would certainly be handy, though I now have what I need. Perhaps one for the resources forum. I did a hunt for borders on here and didn't find any, though perhaps I was just being incompetent...