January 2011 Entry: No title yet

[Jaxilon]

Hey, is anyone else prepared to be blown away? Look in the upper right corner and see what a small portion of the map he's showing us...

@Lonewanderer - I know what you mean about feeling like you don't stand a chance. I still plan to enter but it's almost like things around here just keep ratcheting up all the time. It's a blast to watch though

[tilt]

looks fantastic - love the effects

and as Jax just pointed out "look at the size of that thing" *lol*

[Ascension]

Decided that bright lights are not my thing but I did use them for the gate (still not sure I want that thing in there or not). At least I know that I can do 'em if need be. You know me, dark n moody maps, right? So after futzing around with my text (it seemed to be lacking something but I couldn't find it) for the better part of the week and messing around with trendy light effects I scrapped 'em all. Made all the text smaller so as to convey a larger sense of scale and replaced the town markers with candles and torches that I drew then shrunk. Not sure what type of light I want to use for the two big cities - maybe a lantern or bonfire or gas light type thing or chandelier...don't want to draw a chandelier, though. I dunno depends on what I draw the best tomorrow. Once I get that then it's just doing up labels, key, and finish graphics. If I have any space and time left I might do an inset or something. Oh yeah, I added an escarpment on the right side just using some black and white soft round brushes to accentuate things. The text there says Valley of the Action Figures - they're small but they've got a killer kung-fu grip.

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[Immolate]

I like the names, very Orson Scott Card. The place names are very Hollywood and the candle/torch metaphor as an indicator of size is very clever.

[Jaxilon]

Love the candle/torch idea, that is great. I think a lantern would rock for the bigger cities.

[Gidde]

Aww, you got rid of the path, I really loved that. Ok, so now it looks more serious and challengelike, but that was a seriously cool piece of pure-mana light. Would it be horrible of me to ask you to post that as a png by itself? I promise not to steal it, but it'd be a great thing to be able to overlay onto my concept sketches so I can visualize what the skies of my alternate-reality plane might look like.

And, probably more importantly, the map looks great. On the big cities, you have a height progression going as well as fire-size. Maybe a signal-fire-tower might look cool for the biggest points of light.

[Jaxilon]

Actually, if you could make that mana light into a mouse tail that would be the bomb-diggity

[Ascension]

I'm reading this early in the morning and I don't feel like firing up PS 'cuz it takes too long - I can tell ya how faster. I can tell ya how to make your own pretty easily, though. First use the pen tool and make a path - using the pen tools keeps the curves smooth. Choose whatever brush size you want and stroke the path (i used a 3 pixel soft round). Delete the path. Zoom in closer and make a lil head for the trail, sorta like a sperm thingy, and then either use the smudge tool or the brush and make a pointy tail. Add an outer glow of some color, normal blend, size of around 10 or so, inner glow of the same color but darker with a size of 2 or so (I used a light and dark pink). Duplicate the layer and remove the layer styles. Add a color overlay of something light yellow and lower the opacity until it looks bright. Use a big eraser with a low flow and erase the tail a bit. That's the main beam. The smaller beams were done the same way but with the tablet so that they can be more free-flow instead of precise. The sparkles are the 3-pixel soft round with a spacing of 1000, size jitter of 100, scatter of 1000, count 1 and there are 3 layers of them - one layer has the pink glows, one layer has blue glows, and the top layer has a yellow color overlay.

The ring thing was just a stroked circle, reduced the vertical scale 50%, duplicate the ring and the lower ring gets some glows, rotate the top ring 90 degrees, cut in half so that there is a right side and left side and erased the other half on each layer, apply a few winds to each layer, merge down, rotate back to place, erase a little bit on the part that goes over the middle of the ring, lengthen the streaks vertical scale, give the streaks some glow, then put light beams and sparkles in for accent. Bah, maybe I'll just up the pics.

[Gidde]

Thanks a ton, both for the pics and the how to. Rep to you, you solved a problem for me before I knew I had it, because when I saw that path I thought "YES! That's exactly what the glowing things in the sky of my world are supposed to look like!" Now I can make a skyscape to show my players.

[Ascension]

Mostly I've been wrangling with my fonts and layer styles for the past week (plus a lil Civ 5). Now that I finally have them where I want them I can start coming up with names for stuff. Yes, I know they're small. I don't want to cover up everything and I have this habit of working at 200% zoom instead of normal 100% - even if no one else looks that deeply into my maps I know that I did things as good as possible. The different fonts for different areas have a reason (because I like them that way, nyah - heh heh) but I'll put that in the legend...something old and tattered and parchmenty. If I come up with an idea not so cliche then I'll use that instead. Basically it goes like this: death = purpley-gray, angelic = light blue/gold, nature = green, decay = greenish brown, human = light yellow, chaos = orange, demonic = red, order = white, ruins = gray, monsters = black.

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