Wood block stamp style water (S. John Ross' PS tutorial)(+in GIMP)

[pyrandon]

A convention on many maps today--especially older styled--are the wave lines up and down the coasts that look stamped by a carved wood block.

Here's a great example by a very talented, professional fantasy cartographer, S. John Ross; here he uses the process for the entire ocean: http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/...e+-in%3Ascraps

Thankfully, Mr. Ross is a very generous supporter of the RPG community, so he has created a great tutorial for how to recreate the process using Photoshop: http://www.io.com/~sjohn/uresia-maps.htm

I can vouch for his process, for I've used it myself--albeit not as well!

Enjoy!

[ravells]

Great Find Don,

That trick of changing resolutions is one I've never come across before!

Cheers!

Ravs

[palehorse]

I love this particular technique so much that I worked out another way to accomplish it that doesn't require swapping around files in and out of bitmap mode.

It's going to be the subject of an upcoming episode of my podcast, most likely episode #4.

The short version is: I make a layer with a grayscale area, like the one S. John uses in the first part of his tutorial. I put a Pattern Fill/Adjustment layer on top of that and group it with the grayscale layer, then use the Underlying Layer Blend If slider in the Layer Styles menu to make the pattern vanish from the white areas of the grayscale and become darker over the black areas. Then I put a Threshhold Fill/Adjustment layer on top of that to turn it from grayscale into pure black & white, with the lines thickening and thinning out.

The thing I like about it is, not only do you get that S. John woodcut look, but if you paint (or dodge/burn, or whatever) onto the grayscale layer, you can see how the woodcut effect looks in real time.

It's how I created the rippled lines on the water on my Foster's Meadow map.

[RPMiller]

I like it! I hope you'll let us know when you have the podcast ready.

[Phril]

I hope you folks will forgive a bit of thread necromancy here, but this particular subject is what got me on the hunt that led me to this site in the first place (through an entirely roundabout route).

I've loved S.John's map style since I first saw it on his site.. heck, I bought the book on strength of the maps alone. Unfortunately his tutorial on it is for Photoshop, and all I've got to work with is the GIMP.. and as far as I can tell the mode/bitmap trick he uses is one of the few things PS does that I can't get GIMP to duplicate. Help, please! If anyone out there knows how to replicate this in GIMP or Inkscape (I've recently picked it up and it shows promise, but I'm still an utter noob with it), please let me know.

I have had some luck with a layer fill set to dodge/burn, but while that gets the effect of the lines thinning out away from the coast, it doesn't bleed together at the coasts, so I wind up with a sharp edge between drawn out wedges of black.

Thanks for any help, and I'll be sure to post if I work it out for myself.

[RobA]

Unfortunately his tutorial on it is for Photoshop, and all I've got to work with is the GIMP.. and as far as I can tell the mode/bitmap trick he uses is one of the few things PS does that I can't get GIMP to duplicate. Help, please! If anyone out there knows how to replicate this in GIMP or Inkscape (I've recently picked it up and it shows promise, but I'm still an utter noob with it), please let me know.

Phril-

You happen to be in luck

I've in my back pocket a small tut for making this type of effect in GIMP, check out the attached.

-Rob A>

[Phril]

Thanks a ton, Rob. The newsprint effect is still a little too regular for my tastes, but after fiddling with the displace filter a bit and a few other options, it's definitely a step in the right direction.

Something I discovered: if you're really concerned about the outlines of your shorelines, mask them off before doing the displace. The Y distort will still affect your east-west borders.

I'm experimenting now with using Tools|Color Tools|Threshold.. to add a little more blending between the woodcut lines where they meet the landmass, but that of course drops everything to black & white, which takes a bit of correction. Still, getting there!

[Chgowiz]

RobA - WOW - you just saved me about 3 hours of searching. I had a feeling that if I went through all of the old posts with GIMP in them, I'd find someone who's done something like this. How cool that you did it exactly the same reason I am - following the Zombie videos in GIMP!

Maybe we (OK, you...) should write up how to do Zombie's stuff in GIMP...

Truckin' along...

[Chgowiz]

Alright, I think I got somewhere with this... (click on the picture to see the full size image)



I made my own island (which was a 3 layer chore in and of itself).

Then I airbrushed lightly around the island to create the areas that would be 'cut' out further, similar to what I've seen on Zombie's stuff.

Then I did the newsprint - oh and I made sure that when I did the random clouds, I put the X at zero and Y at largest.

Now the trick will be to do this in the same image that *isn't* grayscale. Not sure how I'm going to tackle that trick.

[wisemoon]

These posts are several years old, but I thought I would mention here that I am adapting Butch Curry's (posting on Cartographer's Guild as palehorse and ZombieButch) video tutorial series to GIMP. I am currently on Episode 6, which uses this woodblock method, so coming across this thread was very helpful! If you look through the Tutorials section of the forums, you should find my thread for the adaptation. I hope you find it useful.

PS: As usual, I will be giving credit and kudos to RobA in my adaptation for this extremely helpful technique!

wisemoon