June 2014 Entry: OCD Mountains

[xpian]

I decided I wanted more mountains.

First, I wanted cleaner lines if I was going to add my own ink. I didn't like dealing with the JPEG artifacts, even if they were pretty minimal. I took the source image and sampled it up to 20,000 pixels tall. At that size, I went to grayscale and used levels to tighten up the blacks and blast out the light JPEG artifacts. Then I dropped the color space all the way down to pure black and white with a diffusion dither, still at the ultra high resolution.

Once I decided it looked good, I converted back to grayscale and started sampling down in stages, letting the dithered black pixels fuzz out into some gray tones again. I settled on a resolution that would allow me to have a few layers to play with in ProCreate--around 3,500 pixels tall. I took the image into the iPad and went to the "zen mountain happy place" in my head and started adding a little more vertical structure.

I should probably stop before I get carried away. Get to the coloring things in part.

### LATEST WIP ###Finish_It_New_Mountains.gif
### LATEST WIP ###Finish_It_v1.gif

[- Max -]

Looks great Xpian. Maybe adding some ink details on the former mountains will make the m more consistent with the new ones?

[xpian]

Absolutely. I had already started a bit, but I'm planning to go over all of the existing mountains and add some similar detail marks so that they all look consistent. I definitely want to keep with the theme of the challenge.

[NedS298]

This is a really good concept; instead of just finishing the map, you're going above the task and actually adding to it. It's looking great.

[dmk]

I like the look, very clean.

[xpian]

I've started adding in some color, but I'm not done with the inking details yet. Still cleaning up the splotchy blue river color...have more excess left to erase. Next version will have some big and interesting additions!

### LATEST WIP ###
Finish_It_v2.jpg

[Domino44]

I like your colors and the mountains you added to the right.

[Diamond]

That is pretty fantastic...

[xpian]

There was a seismic event of some kind that resulted in an uplifting of crust, with a few new mountains appearing on the far left middle.

Inks: Previous "new" mountains are now more complete, with some rivers and waterfalls taking shape and carving canyons. Adding the detail work to make the "original" mountains look consistent with the new is progressing.

Shading: I picked a central group of mountains to start in with the highlights and shadows. I use a noise brush in ProCreate, painting black on a multiply layer for the shadows and painting white on an Add layer for the highlights. (I believe Photoshop calls it "Linear Dodge")

Zoom Detail Regions! : I picked a couple of spots to be the locations of important castles -- probably some stony dwarves and some mountain valley-dwelling elves -- and then created corner call-out squares for the detail views of those regions. There will be much more in the way of fine lines in these boxes when things are done. The slightly altered, slightly more naturalistic rivers in these zoom regions show how, while the perspective and proportions will be the same over all, there will be much more to see. The upper box in particular has some extended river flowage that can't be seen in the main view. The lower box has a mid-stream island that doesn't appear when zoomed out. It will be more clear when things are labeled as to just where the zoom regions are on the big map. You won't need to search around for them.

Color/Tone : still experimenting and thinking about how much color and detail I want to add into the flat regions.

### LATEST WIP ###
Finish_It_Progress_2.jpg
### LATEST WIP ###
Finish_It_v3.jpg

[- Max -]

Excellent so far! Very consistent and the mountains shading sample is great