September 2009 Entry: Passage of Time - Woadsbury

[töff]

The quarry site west of the village, providing stone for the foundations of the first keep and its stone wall, and also necessitating the building of Woadsbury's first bridge at a compromise site between the village and the quarry (the quarrymen wanted it closer to the quarry, of course; the villagers demanded it be closer to the village).

[töff]

You might notice I'm making extensive use of layer masks. I find, in short, that they offer a non-destructive way simply to paint and erase terrain features. With cunning use of layer effects, you don't even need a layer fill itself. In fact, most of my layers are just white pixels; everything is applied via effects and alphamask densities.

I also find that it's quite easy to DISTRESS a layer mask with various filters and procedures to achieve results that you can't get by using similar procedures and filters on the painted layer itself.

[töff]

Expanding the village -- prosperity under the barony!

[töff]

This will be it for 750 A.D.

[töff]

I jsut happened to notice the earthworks mask ... thought it made an interesting pattern, thought I'd share. 2nd screenshot, the appearance of the layer with the rest of the art, and the bevel settings.

[töff]

By the time the Normans land, the Woadsbury family is living pretty well up on the hill, and "downtown Woadsbury" is suffering the medieval equivalent of urban blight.

[Coyotemax]

This is looking bloody amazing.

It's so hard not to rep things just yet, I keep trying to hold off for the end of the contest

[töff]

Thanks -- it's coming along.

Here's the Norman-style castle, with real stone walls and towers. Also, a zoom-out of the wider area.

I need to quit dinking with the different eras and move onto thumbnailing them into the main piece.

[töff]

I've flattened & cropped each of the 5 eras. The last, 1350, will be the overall background. The other 4 will be insets.

[töff]

Here are the 4 previous eras thumbnailed @ equal scale over the latest era (1350).

Obviously I need to bling them around somehow ... as my dad used to say, it's five pounds of $%!# in a three-pound bag.

Then I have all kindsa labels to put on.

And then I must call it done for challenge purposes.