Mythic Montreux

[Tyvent]

Hi folks,

I'm putting together an Ars Magica campaign that will start around the real world locale of Montreux, albeit about 600 years ago. Also, I LOVE MAPS. I've reached a point in preparation where I have to make some.

I'm decent at pencil drawing, but I'd rather produce maps that have an inked quality, and I'm horrible at ink art (I've tried enough to know that I'd need a class to get better at it at a reasonable pace). For those and several other reasons, I thought using a graphics program would be a good alternative. Though I'm generally clever with a computer, I've never had much luck teaching myself how to effectively use graphics programs. Thus, I came here.

I've looked over some of the top tutorials. The one I liked best was darklingrisen's ( https://www.cartographersguild.com/s...ad.php?t=14211 ) for ease, style, and Gimp. That tutorial will work 100% when I get to making maps at a larger scale. However, I can't use it whole for the first map, which will be Montreux and environs in a window of about 1":1000'-1mi scale.

If you look at the GMap snapshot below, you'll see that the terrain is zoomed in enough that representing the mountainous areas as a jumble of peaks would be grossly misleading: there are steep landscapes and gorges that ultimately lead to only a few peaks, not dozens, and certainly not right where the elevations begin in earnest.

Montreux.png

I think I'm going to want to draw the basic contours of the map at 3/4 or 1/2 perspective instead of bird's-eye view, and I figure that the fact that this topography is a real world location will help me out. It might be feasible to get the contours at those angles using Google Earth (haven't tried quite yet because I'm sans mouse right now).

I'm going to attempt to get a snapshot of the topography and import it into gimp. Here's where I'd definitely need help: how do I then create a transparent layer over the snapshot so I can trace the contours and then move those tracings onto a blank canvas? I think that's what I should do, but I don't know how to do it. (Assuming I pull this step off, I'll post the results and ask for some more advice as needed).

If there's a better way to go about what I'm trying to accomplish, I'm all ears for that.

[Deoridhe]

Add a layer in gimp, making it transparent, and you can draw over it. You can also use the magic wand to select things by color (and use the tool editor to vary how much is included) and paste them into the same document, placing them on another level. That might help with finding the edges, since you can separate out the blue and the gray/green that way pretty easily.