03 - Atlas Ward [Mouse]

[Mouse]

What about a different drawing program? ... I know you mentioned GIMP, and maybe it is good to stick with something you already know a little bit and learn more, but I also highly recommend ArtRage. It is great for drawing and painting digitally and is designed to be very intuitive for more artistic-brained people, like us - and it is not very expensive [it is even on sale at the moment].
If you just want to scribble and experiment some, you could download the demo and play with it. And if you have any questions on how to do stuff, I'd be happy to help.

Thanks for the offer Chashio. I'll probably be asking you a few things when I touch up the final CC3 render though having got this far with it I think I will do what I can in CC3 first. As for Artrage... hmmmn. I'm one of those people who gets two pieces of software muddled up in my mind if I try learning two things at once, so I might have a look at it after I've learned how to use GIMP with reasonable proficiency first

I agree with Chashio about Artrage being a great scribbling program. It is what I use when I don't feel like dealing with CC3. I just practice drawing in it every day with my tablet and scribble a lot. Then I practice drawing squares, circles, triangles, upside down triangles, rectangles and any other shape I can think of. I've gotten pretty good at drawing circles. I just make sure I do it every single day. Great program. Mine came free when my ex wife bought me a Wacom tablet for Christmas.

LOL! Thanks Tonnichiwa You need to be careful about drawing too many circles, you know. The superstitious would say that being able to draw a perfect one is a sign of madness... or is that just envy speaking?

Thanks for the full resolution close up of the compass design, I don’t know how I missed that before, but it’s even more stunning this way.

You can definitely scribble in Gimp, just grab a small brush, and go nut’s...Just like drawing on paper, and Chashio is right Art Rage is a really cool programme, it’s fun to play around with. I have an older version for my desk top, but I picked up the touch version on the windows store for like 15 bucks or something.

The natural media brushes in art rage are really good, but Corel Painter tops the cake if you’re trying to simulate water colour in my opinion, and there pencil brushes really look like pencils. I would use Corel Painter more if it worked better on my Surface, it’s really an amazing programme, but it also comes with a steep price tag.

But even tho those programmes are really neat, you can simulate a pencil in Gimp, and Photoshop just fine, and if you check out Deviant art for custom brushes you’ll see that there are thousands that you can download for free....Or you can make you’re own it’s really not difficult...

And on a side note, while I’m on about Gimp, you can make coloured brushes in Gimp, you can’t do that in photoshop. You can make mountains or trees, or houses, or whatever in full colour, and just stamp them in like in CC3. You can even make animated brushes in Gimp, so you could have like ten different mountains, or trees in one animated brush, and it will cycle through to give you more variation, sort of how every time you stamp down a mountain in CC3 it changes to get a more varied mountain range, or forest...Anyway, I’m rambling on now so I’ll stop, I may be procrastinating on getting any work done on my city map, I can’t seem to make myself work on that today for some reason.

The shape was formed by drawing three regular 16 sided polygons on top of one another - large, medium and small, and drawing the folded polygon like a Spirograph drawing from point to point across the circle to the not quite opposite point of the largest polygon each time till it met with its beginning again. I then moved the secondary points in towards the centre one at a time with my move node tool to the two inner 16 sided polygons according to rank of importance till I ended up with the final design. I hope that makes sense! LOL!

[Mouse sucks air and gives teeth wind erosion] 15 bucks is kind of like 4 days food for me (I'm unemployed right now), but maybe it will be the next thing I save up for to reward myself for staying within budget I think I will probably do any additional 'post processing' of the final CC3 render in GIMP, since although I have the entire Corel suite its only version 11 from about 20 years ago, and its doesn't play nice with Windows 10. Drawing the building parts to make the new symbol set was a nightmare because CorelDraw kept crashing every time I did anything too fast for it. Win 10 doesn't like it when a program decides to make use of certain memory allocations, it seems (even though those allocations were fine in Win 8.1)

I think I still have an awful lot to learn in Gimp

...

Thanks all

[Mouse]

Hehehe! John 'Cato Fong' Edward! LOL!

[Mouse]

Thanks GLS

I will try to keep the general shape and form of the cliffs to the shading on John's master map, with a drop of about 30-50 metres? And as for the rest keeping up - I really don't think you need to worry too much about that. Its not a race or a competition. All maps are beautiful in my eye, and where time is concerned - we start when we start... and we end when we end

[Mouse]

Following an appropriate shove in the right direction from John and general encouragement from my neighbour, GLS, I've attacked the cliffs and the bright blue water. Hopefully this is an improvement

### Latest WIP ###
Atlas Ward 02c 70.jpg

[Falconius]

Nice, it makes a big difference. Really added a lot of depth whatever you did. I've been looking at your shadows, have you considered decreasing the angle of the sun (I know it's supposed to be 11:00 but aesthetics can trump that I think). The reason I ask is because I'm considering doing so for my own map and the shadows being cast by things on yours are barely there, except for the towers which I assume are pretty tall.

[Mouse]

Thanks Falconius

I used two sheets (layers) with different types of bevel on them for the cliff effect, and added a couple of boats with drop shadows to emphasise the water surface, which isn't likely to be reflecting very much from top down.

I've been fiddling around with the shadows all over the place! LOL!

Everything is on a different sheet though - short buildings, tall buildings, towers... even the bay windows are on a separate sheet of their own. I'm having a bit of difficulty with the additive effect, in that shadows cast by bay window roofs add to the shadow cast by the main building, so I get a lot of dark spots. I might have to take the shadows off altogether and do them all at the same time - hand drawn.

I think I might increase the length of them just a tiny bit if I can get away with it - not having any that fall outside my district

[Greg]

Thanks Falconius

I used two sheets (layers) with different types of bevel on them for the cliff effect, and added a couple of boats with drop shadows to emphasise the water surface, which isn't likely to be reflecting very much from top down.

I've been fiddling around with the shadows all over the place! LOL!

Everything is on a different sheet though - short buildings, tall buildings, towers... even the bay windows are on a separate sheet of their own. I'm having a bit of difficulty with the additive effect, in that shadows cast by bay window roofs add to the shadow cast by the main building, so I get a lot of dark spots. I might have to take the shadows off altogether and do them all at the same time - hand drawn.

I think I might increase the length of them just a tiny bit if I can get away with it - not having any that fall outside my district

Looking good neighbour Mouse!

With your shadows, cannot you not just (duplicate and then) merge all the relevant layers together to apply a drop shadow to them all at once? That way they shouldn't interfere with one another. And if for whatever reason the merged lot gets in the way, you could always reduce the Fill (that's what it's called on Photoshop) so that only the effect is visible.

Please just ignore that if I'm talking a load of rubbish.

EDIT: Also if something doesn't make sense in there just squeak, and I'll explain away my bad initial explanation.

[ChickPea]

It's looking great, Mouse. Nice to see your super-detailed trees included. All that time you spent working on them in the past is repaying itself now!

I like your building shapes too. You've got a great variety in there.

[Mouse]

It's looking great, Mouse. Nice to see your super-detailed trees included. All that time you spent working on them in the past is repaying itself now!

I like your building shapes too. You've got a great variety in there.

Aw thanks ChickPea

I can use the trees as much as I like, as long as I don't sell the map, or give any of the isolated trees away to others. I will one day draw my own set from scratch, but having already done these that job is quite low on my list of priorities

The thatched and classical style buildings are all part of inbuilt CC3 symbol sets. The Compass Rose is one I built 'on set' from what we call 'shaded polygons', as are the museum and the houses around it. The rest are part of my new building blocks set - the new symbol set I've spent the last 3-4 days trying to get right. I'm still having quite a few teething problems with it, but hopefully in the end it will look ok

[Mouse]

Looking good neighbour Mouse!

With your shadows, cannot you not just (duplicate and then) merge all the relevant layers together to apply a drop shadow to them all at once? That way they shouldn't interfere with one another. And if for whatever reason the merged lot gets in the way, you could always reduce the Fill (that's what it's called on Photoshop) so that only the effect is visible.

Please just ignore that if I'm talking a load of rubbish.

EDIT: Also if something doesn't make sense in there just squeak, and I'll explain away my bad initial explanation.

LOL! I only think I understand what you said, and I can see how it would apply to a paint programme, but CC3 Sheets can't be merged down that way. They either are, or they are not. Moving everything that casts shadows onto one sheet isn't really an option either, since many of the shadow casting objects cast shadows on each other, and shadows can only be cast on underlying sheets - not on buildings that are on the same sheet. For example, if I had a house with a ground floor extension, I'd put the house on a sheet above the extension to make sure the house cast a shadow over the extension.

I think the only thing I can do is draw a shadow casting polygon on a sheet beneath all of them, and have an additional shadow sheet right over the whole lot to draw any that should exist on the roof of the extension cast by the house.

Its either that, or I leave the shadows off the buildings and just do them in GIMP as part of the 'post processing'

Thanks for the compliment, GLS