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Thread: Beginner's Question: I've got a world, but how do I make it look good? (GIMP)

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  1. #1
    Professional Artist Tiana's Avatar
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    The only geography tip I have is that mountain ranges do extend into the water, so you're likely to see island chains where mountain tops are peaking out from the water, there are a few places where I figure there'd be some islands breaking off, though you have some in the places I expect too.

    Sure, it's not pretty yet but it is just a matter of 'make it pretty'. Just like Kell, I too stack several textures using a variety of layer blend modes, usually overlay, soft light, hard light, screen, multiply, but I've even found uses for difference and hue and saturation blends, just fool around with making a sandwich and once you have a good stack, merge it all and save it separately if you know you'll want to reuse that texture. I've been using dierat and hibbary's textures from DeviantArt for years, as well as multiple purchased packs of watercolor bases.

    So I'm just going to literally demo with one of yours (the flat one) how to 'make it pretty'. This took me about 5 minutes to bring it to this stage.

    howtomakemappretty.jpg

    Step 1: selected all the water and changed its color by making a new layer and filling it.
    Step 2: added a unifying color tint via a 'color' or 'hue' layer to preserve the underlying map.
    Step 3: I added 3 textures. Two of them are set to overlay, and one of them is set to multiply. I selected the 'water' by using that mask I made in step one and deleted it from the multiply layer.
    Step 5: I made a new layer and stroked the selection with a 2 pixel line. I then contracted that selection and did another stroke. For a full blown map, I might do this several times if I used an image editing program, though I now use Other World Mapper for this step which automatically generates the shore outline.
    Step 6: I duplicated the outline layer and ran gaussian blur over top of it.

    The following aspects of map creation involve a TON of drawing little details or positioning stamps, but the whole 'make it pretty' is generally just a bit of experimentation with texture sandwiching to get a unique look. I have hundreds of textures stored, so it's never a problem for me to get something to work with.

    Oh yeah, don't forget that you can use a fuzzy eraser to remove sections of texture that you don't want, as well as the clone tool to spread a smaller texture over a wider area. This is how you're going to get vignettes or burnt and torn edges, by using selective pieces of texture. Does that make sense? I don't always use an entire texture. I did on the quick demo I did for you, which used 3 of my stock watercolors which I adjusted to be a similar tone using that mentioned 'color' layer. But often I'll use bits of texture to create special effects, around edges or fancy regions. I almost always flatten the texture out after I'm satisfied with it, to reduce the size of my file, and to ensure no one knows how to reproduce it, not even me. I've lost brilliance when it's crashed before I saved, or I deleted the wrong file. It is kind of an imprecise magic. There's no magic formula for what textures will go well together, though I try to angle for one main simpler texture and then one edging texture and one-three different more complicated patterns on both the land and sea which I put together in a pleasing way with the clone tool or layer style sandwiches. On the sea especially, if I'm aiming for a blue sea I'll do some manual shading of the world beneath the water with a fuzzy dark blue brush and a highlight layer. Rarely on parchment though.

    The textures linked above are a good start. Mouse has a few nice ones (here on the guild) I've used a few times. I haven't used Josh's but a clever thing about his is that he's requiring you to join his newsletter to get them, that's an excellent sales tactic to get an email list of potential clients. They look nice though, same with CoyoteMax's. KMAlexander has a good brush collection. I've used those a handful of times. Actually, I have some textures on DeviantArt too, calthyechild is the username, they're not specifically for maps but they're all freebies. The site's not loading for me right now so I can't dig up direct links. Textures.com and PHere, pexels, and Pixabay have all served me well in the past, though to be honest, the textures I use the most are a few packs of watercolor textures I purchased through a stock art sale for a very modest price, I got thousands of assets in a huge download set for something like $35 and while it's mostly just the watercolors that I use, there was a freakin' ton of assets in that package. Not necessarily a bad idea if you want something you're not finding among free sets. Textures.com does have a daily download limit for freebies but you can get a lot of great stock from it if you visit regularly and get those few freebies or I guess pay but I never have had to from them. I think their 3D textures are pay only, so if I got into modelling I might nab a few.

    Anyway, once you've styled your coastline with the outline expand outline expand technique, you'll either do your text, or your mountains, or your trees next. Maybe cities if that was the most important thing about your map. If the most important thing is that it communicates the names, do the text first and position your art around the text. If it's more of an immersive world piece, start with your favorite world item, mountains or trees, and start planning that out and just make sure to put a stroke around your text if it ends up covering artwork. I always work mountains to hills to trees (and sometimes I'll just sort of do the outline of where the trees will be at this point) then cities/towns, and then fill in the trees afterwards if there are cities close to the trees. I usually go around the map in clockwise or counter-clockwise circles, depending on how I feel like, I might switch this back and forth. This keeps me from losing my mind while thinking about how much there is left to fill, since I'm focusing on that area. Of course I do zoom in and out to make sure that it looks right to me, but I try to pay attention to where I'm filling and make each part a nice little piece of art. I tend to work big to small, going with that whole jar of marbles and then fill it with sand metaphor.

    Hopefully that makes sense? I know one thing that daunted me at first was "how do I handle all of these trees", something that really doesn't bother me anymore. The very first map I ever drew, I remember my hand tensing up about halfway through the forest circles and I began phoning it in, thinking, "why does anyone do this" and then I found tree brushes and was like "aha I don't have to do this" and now half the time, I draw every individual tree. D: KMA's got great trees if you wanted traditional / historical style ones, though. I have used one of his sets for trees on one map and I found it made a very nice forest look. If you want the typical fantasy map, they'd be a good choice, and there's many other brush sets too. That's probably the best choice for a beginner, but if you feel ambitious, it is very rewarding, though tedious, to draw your own forests and position trees. At a zoom like this, you might just do scallops and fill in a few 'clearings' and 'tree tops' to give the hint that it's a forest... then on the edges you do tree trunks.

    As for mountains, I ragequit the last time I tried doing a height map shaded style, so I usually draw ridgelines now. Those are achieved by basically just drawing a jagged line and adding more lines to it until it looks right. It's intuitive more than an exact science. You can also use stamps, it's a time-honored tradition, but mountains most of all I usually draw these days. Still, again, there's great hills and mountains in KMA's sets, so you could always try the stamp method and see how you like it. Even if you don't, it'll give you something to draw over that's closer to that fantasy hand drawn parchment paper look you're hoping for.

    A lot of the magic is "just draw it and work hard and hope for the best" but really, it's more tedious than hard. You made a decent looking base, you definitely have the skills to jazz it up just waiting for you to discover. I could work with this as the actual land base for a map rather than redrawing it and get something nice, so you can too.

    Click my banner, behold my art! Fantasy maps for Dungeons and Dragons, RPGS, novels.
    No obligation, free quotes. I also make custom PC / NPC / monster tokens.
    Contact me: calthyechild@gmail.com or _ti_ (Discord) to discuss a map!


  2. #2

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    Wow, all this is excellent. This is bookmarked for study and experimentation later, since I don't have much time right now.

    Thanks so very much!!

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