Quote Originally Posted by Bohunk View Post
Beautiful map A. The one thing that bugs me, because I tried doing the exact same thing, is the rings around the landmass. They get too perfect and in contrast to the mountains you (and I, in my map) created they destroy the hand drawn look to the map. When I played with this idea in my map I tried everything but drawing the lines myself by hand. You figure if you smooth each ring it might look better but it doesn't and in the end I dropped the map completely until I had time to draw them by hand.
I have not tried it, but if you space the rings out a bit (at least 8-10 pixels from each other or more) you might be able to do a displacement map against each set of rings with a 1-2 px distort to get a slightly more varied line. Not sure what method A is doing as I have not read the whole thing yet, but if stroking a path, I know GIMP can emulate brush dynamics to vary stroke width during the stroke, so I assume PS can probably do that some to. That would also help make it look a bit more hand drawn with the varied line sizes.