The Garnok region of Baldimar

[jfrazierjr]

What happened with this guy? Ya gonna finish it? Those mountains look too good to shelve the project...plus I'd like to see what happens with that forest.

I took a break to do a few mountain symbols, but I will come back to this. In fact, I played around just the other day and updated it with a tree trunk brush I made. My ADD tends to keep me bouncing from one thing to another, and frankly, I am kind of blocked on how to represent my coniferous forest up north in a style that does not clash with the existing forests. I know I will be using a darker green color for the fill, but the shape and interior "texture" is what is giving me fits.

I also have not had a chance to really sit down and think about locations for the various ruins since this is going to be part of a new campaign and since I am a slacker and it's 2 months off.... I just have not been motivated to get that part done. If nothing else, I will play around with changing the existing short cliff to a nice ice shelf cliff face in the next few days.

[Karro]

My ADD tends to keep me bouncing from one thing to another, and frankly, I am kind of blocked on how to represent my coniferous forest up north in a style that does not clash with the existing forests. I know I will be using a darker green color for the fill, but the shape and interior "texture" is what is giving me fits.

I have a thought on that, though not being near something I can draw with at the moment, I can only offer a description of my suggestion.

Try doing an outline, as you did with the larger forest, but instead of giving the forest outline a smooth and rounded appearance, make it angular and jagged - specifically, with triangular jaggies around the edges that rise to northward-pointing tips, and a series of triangular tips across the northward sides of the forest. Then, on the southward sides, as you do here, paint in a bunch of varied-length tree trunks.

For the interior noise of the forest, go again for a triangular (or inverted-v) motif.

Did any of that make sense?

[RPMiller]

See Joe... I told you that is what you should do.

[jfrazierjr]

I have a thought on that, though not being near something I can draw with at the moment, I can only offer a description of my suggestion.

Try doing an outline, as you did with the larger forest, but instead of giving the forest outline a smooth and rounded appearance, make it angular and jagged - specifically, with triangular jaggies around the edges that rise to northward-pointing tips, and a series of triangular tips across the northward sides of the forest. Then, on the southward sides, as you do here, paint in a bunch of varied-length tree trunks.

For the interior noise of the forest, go again for a triangular (or inverted-v) motif.

Did any of that make sense?

I tried that the other night(just in a like 5 minutes), just that outline part and honestly did not like the way it looked. I will get back to it before to long....

[Karro]

Ah, well, if it doesn't work it doesn't work; but in my mind's eye it looks good enough to give it a full-on treatment before scrapping it. Well... other than that, I'd have to ruminate to think of an alternative.

I don't think the "individual tree" effect, though, will work well with the large forest field clump that you have going here. Good luck on making something work, either way!

[torstan]

So I've been playing with this a bit to see if I can get something that works and got to this:

conifers.jpg

The tree outline was quickly inked in. The interior colour was painted in using a large fuzzy brush set to use colour from gradient and Gimp's built in greens gradient. The layer was set to multiply to get nice dark conifers.

The overall light and shade on the trees was done with a 50% grey overlay layer that I then painted onto with a large fuzzy brush with white for the top left edge of the forest and black for the bottom right edge, to give overall bulk and form to the forest.

I created a small brush to do the light and shade on the trees, by drawing a light line and a dark line that faded off towards the bottom on a new layer:

tree.png

I then cut this out from the image and because gimp can use the image on the clipboard as a brush, I had a ready made tree overlay brush. I set the brush spacing to 100 and created a new layer. I then painted over the forest with this until it looked like the trees were well spaced and then set the layer to overlay. I also did this with a much blurrier version of the above brush which did a nice job of giving more general form to it.

For those who are interested, here's the .xcf and the above brush as a .gbr file. Hope this gives foor for thought to the discussion. It can definitely be refined and I'll be interested to see what comes up.

Conifers.zip

[Ascension]

Sweet. Snagged.

[Karro]

So I've been playing with this a bit to see if I can get something that works and got to this:

conifers.jpg

The tree outline was quickly inked in. The interior colour was painted in using a large fuzzy brush set to use colour from gradient and Gimp's built in greens gradient. The layer was set to multiply to get nice dark conifers.

The overall light and shade on the trees was done with a 50% grey overlay layer that I then painted onto with a large fuzzy brush with white for the top left edge of the forest and black for the bottom right edge, to give overall bulk and form to the forest.

I created a small brush to do the light and shade on the trees, by drawing a light line and a dark line that faded off towards the bottom on a new layer:

tree.png

I then cut this out from the image and because gimp can use the image on the clipboard as a brush, I had a ready made tree overlay brush. I set the brush spacing to 100 and created a new layer. I then painted over the forest with this until it looked like the trees were well spaced and then set the layer to overlay. I also did this with a much blurrier version of the above brush which did a nice job of giving more general form to it.

For those who are interested, here's the .xcf and the above brush as a .gbr file. Hope this gives foor for thought to the discussion. It can definitely be refined and I'll be interested to see what comes up.

Conifers.zip

Yeah, that looks great. I think that style matches up awesomely with the round-tree grouping used elsewhere on Joe's map. Reppomundo!

[jfrazierjr]

Thanks to Torstan, I guess I need to get over my lack of motivation and get back to work on this project again... I might even think about getting GP to make a print out to be given to the players once they are ready to complete the opening of the main gate. I can probably get away with something like 11-17 or so and get a decent print out given the ppi and size of the current image.

[torstan]

Thanks. I've been meaning to take a stab at conifers for a while. I'm glad it worked out well.