Reply With QuoteHere's how to color-fade-stroke a path:
The reason for the heavy texturing is to make it look like a tapestry...the edges and fringe will get done last. That being said I turned it down a notch for now. Put in all of the stuff from the first series and debating whether I want to put in the stuff from the second (town names and such but not the voyage). For the voyage line I used the Color Dynamics on the Brush Editor, it might get kind of lost but I thought that I'd explain it anyway in a mini tut (next post). Tweaking the terrain as I go along, put in the forests, swamps, escarpment, etc. Took the stroke off of the roads but now they get lost...kinda like that though.
### Latest WIP ###
If the radiance of a thousand suns was to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...I am become Death, the Shatterer of worlds.
-J. Robert Oppenheimer (father of the atom bomb) alluding to The Bhagavad Gita (Chapter 11, Verse 32)
My Maps ~ My Brushes ~ My Tutorials ~ My Challenge Maps
Here's how to color-fade-stroke a path:
If the radiance of a thousand suns was to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...I am become Death, the Shatterer of worlds.
-J. Robert Oppenheimer (father of the atom bomb) alluding to The Bhagavad Gita (Chapter 11, Verse 32)
My Maps ~ My Brushes ~ My Tutorials ~ My Challenge Maps
It looks even more beautiful now that the forests have been added!
(how did you do the forests by the way?)
The ongoing sketchpad - Craig's Sketchpad (NEW)
Design and web services - CJ Productions
All the latest at my personal blog - Craig John
Photoshop Training Podcast - Graphic Basics (currently on hold)
Awesome map.. it's the kinda thing i was looking for when I stumbled upon the Guild a few months back; though mine is hopefully going to end up as your initial suggestion, that of a satellite map.
Anyway, bravo sir.
It seems every time I come here I run across a map that is stunning, and makes me think how much work I'm gonna have to do just to get 1/10th as good as you guys.
Great looking map. I haven't read the books in some time, but I recognize a few spots.
I think the 'tapestry look' is much better now, it doesn't overpower the map itself.
Those trees are some of the best I've seen...c'mon give it up, how'd you do them?
Any chance you're gonna do the maps from the Ellenium and the Tamuli series'?
My Finished Maps | My Challenge Maps | Still poking around occasionally...
Unless otherwise stated by me in the post, all work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
Thanks for the compliments guys. SG, probably because those are more interesting coastlines and I can use cooler fontsThe forests were pretty long and tricky but I'll do my best :
I started with the 9 pixel hard round tip and white color, set the spacing to 90% (so that they would overlap but still produce something bubbly), then set the scatter to 200% in order to produce something randomly splattered around. I drew in a rough shape for a forest and then went back and filled in the middles with some more blobs (with this same tip and not the paint bucket because the tip will leave lots of empty spaces and that's the whole important thing...it's not one giant blob). Then around the edges I put some scattered clumps with the same tip. Next I filled a layer with solid black and merged the two layers together and hit it with a small Brush Strokes-Spatter (used 5 on both settings)...this gives me something less "rounded" and more noisy but both ways look good. Delete the blacks, apply a pattern overlay, color overlay (dark green), drop shadow (5 on all 3 settings) and textured bevel of the same pattern (default PS pattern known as molecular at 50% scale to give me some height on my treetops) and the colors were a yellow green and dark green for the bevel highlight and shadow.
On a new layer I did clouds, then 20 iterations of difference clouds, gradient mapped a dark green and reddish tan to the black and white clouds, trimmed to fit, and set to the layer blend to hue...now I have color variations of green to brown trees. I then duplicated my land bump map - the one I always run lighting effects on (the second one from my tuts not the first one that gives mountains), trimmed this to fit and set to multiply to give me some more undulation.
Kinda long but those who know the techniques can follow pretty easily. I particularly like the areas where the swamps are...the trees really seem to come alive in those areas with more 3-dimensionality...and the swamps are just a pattern (PS default called towel at 200%) and dark teal color (blend mode of multiply) underneath the trees. So all in all; one shape layer with layer styles, one color adjust layer, and one bump layer.
If the radiance of a thousand suns was to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...I am become Death, the Shatterer of worlds.
-J. Robert Oppenheimer (father of the atom bomb) alluding to The Bhagavad Gita (Chapter 11, Verse 32)
My Maps ~ My Brushes ~ My Tutorials ~ My Challenge Maps
I love it - it really gives the feel of individual trees as opposed to a blob of forests!
(and I WILL be using that technique on any future map I do)
The ongoing sketchpad - Craig's Sketchpad (NEW)
Design and web services - CJ Productions
All the latest at my personal blog - Craig John
Photoshop Training Podcast - Graphic Basics (currently on hold)
Cool thanks...I'll have to give that a try sometime.
No way I would've ever come up with that, my PS-Fu is not nearly strong enough.
Looking forward to seeing the Elenium and Tamuli maps if/when you get to them.
My Finished Maps | My Challenge Maps | Still poking around occasionally...
Unless otherwise stated by me in the post, all work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
Have to agree that the texture looks much better now, and I like what you did with the path. It's a lot easier to tell the difference between travelpath/river/border now.
Tiny nitpick: Looks like you've got a typo in #8: sometihing
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