My World of Kelleemah

[CharlesRobinson]

What a cool idea Tonnichiwa! I can use them for the Tasman who live within the Shattered Isles. :-)

[Tonnichiwa]

Oh cool! I look forward to seeing them!

[CharlesRobinson]

I updated the map a little today. I put in a parchment background for the four icons in each corner, deleted the Mike Schley Inks and added back in the colored Mike Schley symbols.

All I have to do now is finish red borders, but they are rather time consuming to do.

I have the hexes "hidden" on this one. :-)

[Creativetides]

Awesome sauce

[Mouse]

I like the parchment

How about putting the parchment behind everything? I have a feeling that might greatly improve the whole B/W symbol and colour area theme

EDIT: I have a couple of parchment textures in my parchment folder (link below) that you could try out if you don't want a repeating pattern in the background (these were drawn by me in GIMP - so no copyright/EULA/royalty problems there). You would need to import them into the map as background image files, but I do it all the time and it seems to work fine. If you do that, and use an overlay blend mode on all the other layers above it, the whole lot will look convincingly hand drawn and watercolour tinted on parchment.

[CharlesRobinson]

Mouse,

I am thought about making a parchment version. There is a way to make the white hill and mountain symbols clear I believe, but I am not sure.

[Mouse]

You can use a blend mode on the symbols - multiply would be best to get rid of the white.

I know! I know! Sheet effects just don't work on symbols.

But they DO!

You just have to make them 99% opaque by adding a Transparency effect at the top of the effects list. After that a multiply blend mode works just fine

(Or at least it does on my maps)

EDIT: Here is an example of B/W symbols made transparent as described.

Transparent symbols.JPG

The only hitch is that it doesn't work as predictably with colour symbols But since you are attempting to make BW symbols transparent there shouldn't be a problem

EDIT 2: Alternatively (and this only works for BW symbols) do away with all the effects and just add a colour key effect with the colour set to white. That works just as well as the previously stated combination of transparency and blend mode.

[Mouse]

This might be moving further away from the point of what you are trying to do, but if you use a colour key set on white instead of magenta (the default colour) to get rid of the white bits of a BW symbol, you can then use an overlay blend mode to blend the black bits of the symbols into the background parchment as if they were drawn on it in old ink.

Transparent symbols2.JPG

EDIT: Using an overlay mode, while really attractive, would cause a few complications if you start to add sheets of colour to the same map, since overlay will pick up the colour of whatever is on the underlying sheets and look different on different colours.



EDIT 2: For some strange reason, none of this works at all on the Mike Schley black and white symbols - even though it works perfectly on all the other black and white symbol sets I've tried. I wouldn't know about whether it works on any of the annual symbol sets, since I don't have any of the annuals.

[CharlesRobinson]

Thanks for the wonderful information Mouse! :-)

[Mouse]

You're very welcome, Charles

I only hope some of it is of some practical use for you at some stage, even if it isn't for this map