Inkscape Cartography

[Supine]

After starting with Inkscape, I'm currently lost on one major thing: How does one add rough edges and map detail to vector outlines? The obvious answer is to make more nodes and then just bend the path around in order to make detail, but that seems to lack the detail one gets just by drawing on paper. In particular, I'm trying to add fjords, and in the end they consistenly end up as round inlets, and it seems like it would take hundreds of nodes just to get a realistic level of detail into it.


EDIT: I think I found a little something that might just work for this. and I found it within the Tweak tool. I can write a little tutorial if anyone wants it, but it provides way more control than raster noise generation on every level, which makes it pretty cool. I made the below image from a square vector path. This technique does most of the work for you, seriously.


Borders Example.png

[Hai-Etlik]

You might also want to look at Extensions - Modify Path - Fractalize

It's an all or nothing effect for the selected path, but it gives a more "multi level" kind of roughness than the Tweak tool.

[Supine]

Huh, that's nice too. I'm playing around with mixing the two now, it seems that Tweak might be the way to go for the original outline, which I finish up with Fractalize and then touch up with more Tweak tool.