Experiment in progress, advice sought

[Hai-Etlik]

Sorry to hear about your hand... best wishes for a speedy recovery.

Say, would you be able to identify the projection used in the second map HBrown posted, the one from the Stieler Atlas?

Would guess its an azimuthal projection centred on Europe.

[HBrown]

Exactly! Did you just whip this up by hand or is there some nifty method to get the hand-drawn look that I have completely missed?

Quick 'n' dirty with a big soft brush. Took maybe twenty minutes. I'm sure the people who hand-painted the originals, and probably got paid piecework, took much less time.

[HBrown]

Here's a semi-automagic way to do it:

Take the country's boundary as a selection.
Grow it a little and feather it.
Fill the country with the color.
Shrink the selection the width of your brush.
Feather it some more.
Add a layer mask in white (shows all) and fill the selection in black to clear the country's center.

The parameters can be tweaked to make the colors fit less exactly to the coastline. For the sample I've attached, I grew a few pixels and feathered by twenty. After color-filling, I shrank by forty and feathered by fifty. I did all the countries that are the same color at the same time.

18C_test_02_alt.png