Thanks, Abu, and no worries, I lurk a lot too sometimes as it's so easy to get lost behind on the many great things on here!Originally Posted by Abu Lafia
Fantastic work GLS, love the neat political map style you've going here! The subtle colours and the labeling are just lovely. Really nice ideas for the names, and many thanks for ze german ü "Umlaut" btw! XD
PS: Due to my rather lurkish mood lately, I haven't commented much on your many posted maps, but be assured i saw (and enjoyed!) them all.
Thanks, Straf, and I'm liking what you're doing with yours a lot, so you definitely shouldn't be embarrassed.This is such a masterpiece I'm almost embarrassed to pit my puny effort against it
I'd love to learn some techniques from this - for example how do you get the labelling to look printed, but faded?
For the faded text, I used the principles laid out in this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCZ2...nnel=TallFrost) - essentially, just take a distressed texture and selecting a part of it to remove from the text. It took a bit more playing about to do for my labels as they're a lot smaller and spread out than the logo in the video, so the selection needed to be finer and less broad.
Also, one key thing worth mentioning is that I duplicated all the text and merged the duplicated bunch all together into one layer. This meant that the original text stayed undamaged so I could try various versions without losing the original (you need to hide the original text layers though otherwise they'll be seen underneath). It also meant that I could nice and easily delete the worn effect from the single text layer in one fell swoop.
I hope that makes sense, but I'm not always the best at explaining things, though the video should do most of that!
Oh, and I did this on Photoshop, but I see nothing there that shouldn't be easy enought ot do on any similar software like GIMP.
*EDIT* - Also, a lot of the main principles of the map were somewhat adapted from this great tutorial, http://1blomma.deviantart.com/art/Tutorial-362679147, which Dan(iel Hasenbos) kindly shared a little while ago when he did a replica map of Europe (I think). Whilst it is mainly built around replica maps and not creativity, it has some great tips and technique in it for a lot of mapmaking.
