Nov-Dec 2019 Challenge: Ward 42 Smuggler's Map

[aeshnidae]

Let's do stitches, they said! It'll be fun, they said! It'll be super easy to Shade. Every. Single. Stitch. <smh>

I did some cleanup, played around with placement, and added more text.

### Latest WIP ###
Ward 42 Smuggler's Map v5.jpg

[Tiana]

ROFL yeah you hand crafted all those stitches you crazy person you, but it's great, it's almost perfect for what it is. Like I imagine this is in a museum and the heroes have to steal it because it marks the secret entrance to the Thief's Market... by having a stitch crossed over in a different direction. And the hand burnt lettering is amazing!

My thoughts:
Something about the text embossment on the placard sits wrong on my eyes, but only zoomed in. Manually sneak in a bit of shading where a piece of the map might sit 'higher' because old leather isn't going to sit perfectly enough to have that calculated shadow, and with a couple of little splots of shadow you could increase its organicness. I'd also dab in a tiny bit of shadow around the corners of the piece of backing inside the frame to imply how it's been wrapped around and shoved into the protective frame.

Realtalk:
I'd put one on my wall. Ideally an actual piece of stitched and burned leather preserved behind glass, but there's definitely print potential here. It's so dang charming. I get it, your wrists ache, but you'll look back and be like, "man I'm so glad I made that crazy piece with all the stitches, it was such a unique addition to my portfolio." You have nothing remotely like this, and neither does anyone else. This is a one of a kind stroke of genius in contemporary fantasy mapping. While the rest of us are out doing city icons, you were shading stitches to make it look like a photo of a real stitched found leather map, and that's neat.

[RobEm]

Something about the text embossment on the placard sits wrong on my eyes, but only zoomed in.

I marvelled at this, great work! I didn't notice anything until I read this, when I spotted that the sides of the frame go (from the outside to the inside) from dark to light, whilst the top and bottom appear to go from light to dark, and the opposite sides appear to be mirror images of each other. To my eye this creates a slightly odd 3d effect, but if this is what you were aiming for then read no further! Normally the illusion of depth is created by shading pairs of adjacent sides based on where the light source is: in Windows, for example, the canonical light source is top left, so raised buttons are pale on the left and top and darker below and to the right, whilst recessed text entry boxes are shaded above and to the left and the bottom and right borders are highlighted.

I hope this makes sense!

[aeshnidae]

ROFL yeah you hand crafted all those stitches you crazy person you, but it's great, it's almost perfect for what it is. Like I imagine this is in a museum and the heroes have to steal it because it marks the secret entrance to the Thief's Market... by having a stitch crossed over in a different direction. And the hand burnt lettering is amazing!

My thoughts:
Something about the text embossment on the placard sits wrong on my eyes, but only zoomed in. Manually sneak in a bit of shading where a piece of the map might sit 'higher' because old leather isn't going to sit perfectly enough to have that calculated shadow, and with a couple of little splots of shadow you could increase its organicness. I'd also dab in a tiny bit of shadow around the corners of the piece of backing inside the frame to imply how it's been wrapped around and shoved into the protective frame.

Realtalk:
I'd put one on my wall. Ideally an actual piece of stitched and burned leather preserved behind glass, but there's definitely print potential here. It's so dang charming. I get it, your wrists ache, but you'll look back and be like, "man I'm so glad I made that crazy piece with all the stitches, it was such a unique addition to my portfolio." You have nothing remotely like this, and neither does anyone else. This is a one of a kind stroke of genius in contemporary fantasy mapping. While the rest of us are out doing city icons, you were shading stitches to make it look like a photo of a real stitched found leather map, and that's neat.

Thanks, Tiana, I'm so glad you like it! I will definitely play around with shading on the placard. I'm not fond of how the text turned out but haven't had time to futz with it yet. I would love to create this on an actual piece of leather.

I marvelled at this, great work! I didn't notice anything until I read this, when I spotted that the sides of the frame go (from the outside to the inside) from dark to light, whilst the top and bottom appear to go from light to dark, and the opposite sides appear to be mirror images of each other. To my eye this creates a slightly odd 3d effect, but if this is what you were aiming for then read no further! Normally the illusion of depth is created by shading pairs of adjacent sides based on where the light source is: in Windows, for example, the canonical light source is top left, so raised buttons are pale on the left and top and darker below and to the right, whilst recessed text entry boxes are shaded above and to the left and the bottom and right borders are highlighted.

I hope this makes sense!

Thanks, RobEm, that does make sense! I didn't notice it until you pointed it out. And now I'm wondering how the heck that even happened...the frame is a photo I took of a piece of art in my parents' house. IRL, the frame has "steps" that decrease in height as they move from the outside portion of the frame to the inner portion. That's showing up correctly on the top half of the frame. No clue what's going on with the bottom part! I didn't notice any strange shadows when I took the photo so I'm perplexed. Huh!

[aeshnidae]

Trying to work on the weirdness with the frame. Not sure I actually did anything useful...

### Latest WIP ###
Ward 42 Smuggler's Map v6.jpg

[Marc]

This is an awsome concept and execution of it Aeshnidae, really well done!
The framework looks much better now. The only suggestion I would make, is a little bit of gausian fading on the shadows the leather and plaque are casting on the red fabric...they look a bit to sharp around the edges.

[aeshnidae]

This is an awsome concept and execution of it Aeshnidae, really well done!
The framework looks much better now. The only suggestion I would make, is a little bit of gausian fading on the shadows the leather and plaque are casting on the red fabric...they look a bit to sharp around the edges.

Thanks, Marc! Your suggestion is excellent but boy do I suck at gaussian anything in Photoshop. (I can apply the blur to the whole image, but not discrete parts of a layer. I assume this is user error, as I probably understand only about 10% of Photoshop's abilities!) I adjusted the shadow using other methods and hopefully fixed the sharpness issue (or at least started to fix it).

### Latest WIP ###
Ward 42 Smuggler's Map v7.jpg

[Marc]

By lack of a emoji: *thumbs up* !
That's a 75% improvement
I only have photoshop CS2 and it's somewhere gathering dust because I've been on a borrowed laptop since I started Mapping (new pc on the way) so I can't remember how to do it in PS. Do know how to on GIMP...but that won't be off any help to you

[aeshnidae]

By lack of a emoji: *thumbs up* !
That's a 75% improvement
I only have photoshop CS2 and it's somewhere gathering dust because I've been on a borrowed laptop since I started Mapping (new pc on the way) so I can't remember how to do it in PS. Do know how to on GIMP...but that won't be off any help to you

Alas it won't, but I appreciate the thought! I think there are certain actions that are fairly easy in GIMP and yet wildly complicated in Photoshop, and I'm not sure why that is. Godspeed to your new PC!

[damonjynx]

Hey Jen,

Very nice piece and super cool concept.

Re the burnt text. I’m not sure how you’re doing it but it looks like a low opacity overlay layer which would be my first step as well. Given the texture of the leather you could also add a displacement filter/layer. Check out Butch Curry’s series, Fantasy Cartography in Adobe Photoshop on YouTube. It is excellent! In one episode he talks about using displacement filters to get his roads following the texture of his ‘paper’ and I think it would help your map. Just follow his steps (save your work with a different name first though, you wouldn’t want to accidentally do something you can’t undo��)