1PDC 2011 Entry

[RecklessEnthusiasm]

An obvious winner! I love your ISO style, djekspek!

[tilt]

Great map djespek as usual... love all the little details and notes .. and please let it be a gold mine

[Jaxilon]

Oh please let it be a Gold mine!! Awesome!

[TheRedEpic]

Bella Bella, I LOVE this style and type of map Bravo!

[RjBeals]

everything looks so clear and vivid. I would love to see your psd. Do you use black outer glow set to overlay? to make it pop ya know?

Do you have a separate black outline layer that is basically your sketch? If so, do you duplicate that layer to make the outlines bolder and sharper? If not, do you just use 1 layer like many artists?

As others said, your work is truly inspiring.

[Djekspek]

thanks! @RJ: not much special in layers here. Going from top to bottom, the layers are:

- 1 saturation and 1 brightness adjustment layer
- some texture layer in overlay to give some atmosphere
- lines (when all lines are done, I draw an extra fat outline line to indicate depth, same as the optrion in sketch-up, but then handdrawn). For lines I use a square brush.
- grid in overlay with a clipping mask to show only on floors
- clipped on mask (below) hi-lite and shade layer set to overlay with black and white to accentuate and add extra shade for depth. This gives the real depth feel in combination with the line-work
- clipped on mask (below) the mask I have a value layer with grey-scale values
- mask of complete dungeon with an outer dark glow
- background parchment

cheers, DJ

[RjBeals]

how come my maps have like 200 layers.

Thanks DJ. That fat outline is awesome. I didn't notice until you mentioned it, but it does add a bit of depth. you draw everything with square brush? or just that outline?

one last thing, how big and what res did you create the original? I know I've asked you that before, but I really love your style!

[Djekspek]

hehe, I had some more layers on this one but i skipped the fonts, borders, etc. in my list. My atlas-style maps have many more layers as well. As for my brush, I used to draw with rounded brush, but switched to square. Basically all linework I do with a square brush now (usually 3-6pt at 100% opcity/flow with pressure set to size). For values I use a rounded brush (and sometime the color mixer brush from CS5) at different values and opacity. For document size, I usually just make it the size I want it (like letter or A4) at 300dpi. But sometimes I create the map at 2-3x the "final-size", if I want to have some more control over details... cheers, DJ