[Award Winner] Antique-style maps in Photoshop

**m-boy** · 04-27-2009, 05:40 AM

Thanks a lot, Ascension

I just have to say that this is the best tutorial I've seen in a while ^_^
and the results are really professional looking - after creating such a map it's quite a pleasure to elaborate on the story for an unique RPG experience - it helps a lot to feel the proper atmosphere for the world setting that one's aiming for

Below I'm posting my result from following the tutorial steps, I didn't follow them very strictly and I skipped a few steps so I can spend more time on others, as I was aiming on a single island for a pirate adventure (rather than a whole continent with a number of countries)

Also worth mentioning is that the tutorial consists of many easy to follow steps and is very detailed making it so versatile that with it one can build anything he wishes for, even maps based on real world places, as I did: a real map of Jamaica and Port Royal was used as a reference (attached here too), it's very low resolution... that doesn't matter, though - resizing it and setting the opacity low was very helpful for step 4 (shaping the landmass); I just had to use very small brush for fine-tuning the contour where necessary

Well, sorry for this long post but I'm really happy with the things I learned from this tutorial and wanted to share the result
credits for the map go to the entire Cartographer's Guild as both the knowledge and the parchment texture used for the final touches were gained thru these forums

Btw, nice map, Eagleyes, you give me some good ideas for improving future maps (your mountains are very cool ^^)

Notes about the attachments:
1. Jamaica(wOpt).png => Final result! The PNG is optimized to be a small size (meaning there are less colours than supposed >.< so some of the effects look dull), if someone is interested I can post bigger versions (unoptimized is ~5 mb), or psd files;
2. Jamaica+Port Royal.jpg => as you see this map's resolution (island area) is just 300x150, that's the map I used as a reference in Photoshop; I now need a way to do the smaller Port Royal area
3. Jm-map.png => Modern map of Jamaica (from wikipedia), I'm putting it just for comparison with the next map, I saw it by the time I was doing the scale bar as I went to wikipedia to check the size of the island (it's 150 miles)
4. Jamaica-5.jpg => earlier version, without the old-paper-ish look, it really looks like a lot better version than the one in wikipedia ^^ (if you don't count some rivers and that Chi Gow village I added... and the mountains that are probably not there IRL lol)