Layers woes

[davoush]

Hello,

I am having some trouble with textures, colouring, and layers. I should mention I am using Affinity Designer, which is very similar to Illustrator and also has the ability to create raster layers. Any advice coming from PS/AI users would be useful as well.

Long story short - I am unsure how to colour different areas of my map without the colours effecting each other, while maintaining the parchment texture look.

At the minute, I have the parchment set as the background with a colour 'layer' (each vector object is its own layer in AD). I make the 'colour layer' a paleish blue which is transparent enough for the texture detail to come through.

On top of this are all my continents. Now, when I colour the continents, it is either: 100% opacity with desired colour, but no texture can be seen. Or, less than 100% opacity (or a different mode such as overlay), and the blue colour effects the continent colour. The only solution I have found so far to maintain texture and be able to colour continents without ocean interfering is to image-fill each landmass with the texture. However, this means my document would have many, many pasted texture images for each landmass and tiny island - not ideal.

How do others get around this? I realise I may be missing a very obvious solution or I'm thinking too much in vector terms. For example, would you just rasterise the whole image and then manually paint the ocean, each continent, etc. separately so there are no unwanted colours lying under each other?

Warlin's wonderful Atlantide is an example of texture with separately coloured ocean and various areas:
https://www.cartographersguild.com/a...5&d=1482090984

Many thanks.

[Mouse]

That sounds a lot like the way CorelDraw handles objects - each its own layer. Is it possible to cut the continent shape out of the ocean by using a Boolean operation? By that I mean using something like Trim, or Intersect (as they would be termed in CorelDraw).

[Pananacakes]

I'm not sure I understand your problem right. You need transparency for the parchment background texture to show, but transparency makes different colored layers show through one another thereby changing the colors? If that's right then have you tried putting the parchment texture on top of all the other layers instead of at the bottom? Put it on top and set it the blending to overlay or luminosity so the patterns show but the stuff beneath shows through too. Can you do that with Affinity Designer?

[Mouse]

That's a genius idea!

I hope it's possible in AD

[davoush]

Thanks both.

@Mouse - This seems to be what I was looking for. I was sat thinking 'Why can't I just colour the ocean without it colouring the continents too!' Of course, in vector the ocean is a rectangle placed behind everything, so the whole thing gets coloured. Now I need to figure out which boolean operation to use....

@Pananacakes - Thanks, this is useful to know! For my current map, my problem seems to be that I'm thinking in pixel-mode, but using vectors.

[Mouse]

I would try Pananacakes' suggestion first, davoush - its less destructive and can be more easily undone

[davoush]

@Mouse: The problem was that because I am working in vector, the continent shapes were placed on top of the ocean layer with low opacity (which is a rectangle covering the canvas, coloured blue). The colour of the ocean-rectangle effected the continent-shapes as it was lying beneath everything, if that makes sense. In other words, by cutting the continent shapes from the ocean, I am able to colour each separately while maintaining the texture. Pananacakes' idea is certainly worth remembering though!

[Mouse]

Keep a chain of versions saved - at least one for each session you do on the map, so that if you do something you later regret, you don't lose the rest of the work

Also - if you want to continue working on this map and getting comments on your progress, I would strongly recommend starting a Work in Progress thread (a WIP thread) in the relevant WIP sub forum , where it will be seen by a lot more people interested in making helpful suggestions

[davoush]

Thanks Mouse. I will shortly make a WIP thread. After some more fiddling around, I have come to the conclusion the easiest way is to simply image fill each 'object' with the texture at 100%. As it is a full world map, selecting each tiny island and subtracting them is too time consuming. Affinity Designer doesn't seem to like subtracting in groups either. I imagine this problem wouldn't occur if I had started with raster from the beginning, as colour selection etc. is easier, however as it is a full world map, I enjoy the flexibility of vector.