"The Spider's Nest" - inked-in WIP

[Abu Lafia]

Ok, i'll continue with explaining how i would tackle the second problem you encountered.

- "Fade" the ocean around the coastal regions to signify shallower waters and make the land pop. I also haven't been successful with adding different "ocean" layers and adjusting the opacity to achieve different tones as several artists have suggested in other threads.

First i want to delve into some things. The Brush Dynamics are a rather nice feature of Gimp. Krita and also PS seem to have more powerful tools for that, but you still can do a lot of awesome stuff with it in Gimp. There is a nice range of funny dynamics preinstalled and i can only recommend to take a look at them sometimes. You can even customize and tweak them to your liking (to a certain extent), although i have to admit, that i haven't used the possibility to create or customize my own brush dynamics too much in the past and many features are still pretty much unknown to me.
Yet for one thing it is quite necessary to create a new brush dynamic, that is for making nice textures that don't look too regularly patterned. You can achieve this by making your brush rotate randomly. Ofc if you have a clean round brush it won't matter too much, but if you want to work with a fuzzy/grungy brush for making textures for your maps (and that's exactly what you want to do, right?) it looks much better, i promise

= Excursus: How to create a "rotating" brush dynamic in gimp =
The steps shown here are from my tutorial about "Parchment Background for Titles, Legends, etc. in Gimp" where i covered this too.

Click on the Dynamics button in your Paintbrush Tool Options dialog and then Open the dynamics selection dialog.

Here you choose Create a new dynamics.

Name the new Dynamic "Rotation" and click in the table on the "Angle / Random" box.

Congratulations, now you have a custom made brush dynamic that is only rotating!

Ok, now finally we have all the tools ready to come to the actual task, to create some nice fading shallow waters around the coastline. Here is how i like to do them:

Create a new layer, "Shallow Waters" might be a good name.
Set the Layermode to Overlay.
Have you saved the selection of your landmass? If not just select it again and do it with Select > Save to Channel
If you did, go to the Channels Menu.
Right-click the saved Selection Mask.
Choose Channel to Selection.
Set your Foreground color to white. Grab a nice grungy brush (for the shown examples below, i used the Brush called "Acrylic 04#2 i saw in your list of brushes in your screenshot) and under Tool Options set the Opacity to 20-30%.
You got to experiment with the brushsize, because it depends on the size of your selection/landmass.
Make sure, to set the Spacing of your brush to 20-30!
Your setup should now look similar to this:
Step4.jpg
It does? Fine!

Now it gets a bit tricky, since there are several options or paths to follow. None of them is as "clean" as i think you could do it wit Photoshop, and i use them for different things.

Basically the whole technique is about stroking with your grungy brush along your selection or your path. (Edit>Stroke Selection or Edit<Stroke Path) You can create a path from your selection by Select>To Path, but in my example here i go with just the selection for the start. In the above mentioned Tutorial the same thing is done by stroking the path.

Make sure you've selected the landmass not the water around it. If you Edit>Stroke Selection now, a window appears.
Step5.jpg
Choose Stroke with a paint tool, and choose Paintbrush. Activate Emulate brush dynamics.
With the low opacity and a rather small brush it might look as if nothing happens at first, that's why you repeat this step for maybe 4-5 times, each time enlarge the size of your brush. In the example i started with 25, then i doubled the size to 50, then to 100, 200, 400, .... To make the shallow waters fade more gently into the deeper waters, you can also lower the opacity step by step.
Here you really have to experiment a bit with the settings until you like it.

As you can see, the brush strokes directly on the selection, so the brush is still on both sides of the selection. You can now just Edit>Clear the brush stroke inside the selection leaving only the part on the water.
Since the effect was rather subtle after going through this, i decided to Duplicate the "Shallow Waters" Layer
and set the Opacity of the Layer to 50%. You can also make every single instance of your Stroke on a seperate Layer if you like, so you can tweak the respective Layer Opacity better afterwards.
Well, this is the result and i hope it is similar to the effect you wanted to achieve.
Step6.jpg

[Chris Lewis]

Thank you so much for the time you took to explain this workflow, AL. Wow! I am still trying to work on the first tutorial you sent and coming along slowly. I will throw another update over the wall as soon as I get some worthwhile results.

[Galendae]

It's one of Torstan's maps.

Thanks J.Edward!
Excellent site you linked. I recognize Torstan's style, now that you point it out. He has taken it to another level, clearly he continues to improve. May we all aspire to such levels.

[Chris Lewis]

### Latest WIP ###
Hello everyone. This has a lot of imperfections but I'm throwing it up against the wall and looking for lots of help. This is about my third solid week using GIMP (with a mouse) and I have no other background with graphic software so it's been a grueling few weeks. In this iteration I just started again from scratch and focused on the ocean by incorporating the information that Abu provided in the thread - thank you for all the help through email and the plethora of information you provided in this thread, my friend Far from where I want to be, but certainly further along then I was days ago.

Updates:

- I textured the ocean using the standard brushes in GIMP. I need to figure out how to make (or where to download/how to install) a grunge brush so any help would be appreciated. I don't like that you can see lines in the different passes I made with the brush and need to work on blending them in more. I'm not achieving the smooth look that Abu did in his comments above so any thoughts here would be appreciated.

- I added the coastal wave lines from my inked-in version, which look horrible, and I probably should have lowered the Opacity. Any guidance here would also be helpful. I know, much easier if I was using a tablet. I installed the "Tapered Stroke Pad" add-on but not quite sure how to use it. That probably would have helped too :/

- I quickly added color to the vegetation using a channel and really wanted to understand the concept behind that and how channels work. In the future, I'll also leave out the shading from my line drawing and do the shading in GIMP. Anyone have thoughts on that, I'd appreciate hearing them.

Thank you for any feedback you want to provide - critique, guidance, suggestions, etc. - all is welcome.

Okay, I'm giving everyone the green light. Ready, set, GO!

spiders nest_v006.png

[Ilanthar]

You have a strong contrast between the land (bright) and the sea. Not a real problem, but it's really drawing your attention to the land, imo.
Your coastline looks a bit pixellated, maybe a "blur" filter could change that. I tend to not use pure black/white, and I think your coastline and ripples are too b/w. You can just play with opacity to correct that anyway, just as you mentionned.
Don't hesitate to play with opacity/layer effects. Sometimes, you just turn something good into something really great just by playing with your different layers settings .
Keep up the tests & tries, I'm confident you'll come with an excellent map .

[Mouse]

Looks like you have come a long way with Abu's help, Chris

Have you tried experimenting with changing the mode of each layer yet? Its the drop down box just above the opacity setting. Overlay and multiply seem to be about the most useful.

I know you want to emulate the work of others, but you will develop your own style in time, and I like your ocean

EDIT: ninjad by Ilanthar! LOL!

[Abu Lafia]

Hey Chris, i'm glad to see this turned out so well! I can only wholeheartedly agree with Ilanthar and Mouse here and the great suggestions they made. I also would love to see the white coastal wavelines' layer set to overlay. Btw. i don't think they look horrible at all, but you also could "Filter>Blur" them for example, as Ilanthar suggested for the coastline.
The "smoothness" and blending of the layered brushstrokes also depends on the background texture and colour i think. The blue of your sea looks more saturated than on my example and the parchment texture you used is richer in contrast. I think this might have an effect on making the individual iterations of brushstrokes stand out more.
Ofc, using other brushes might be a good solution too. Not sure if you used the one shown in my screenshot (Acrylic 04#2). It is in the basic set and comes closest to the desired effect in my view. When doing this i searched the web to provide a link to the brush(set) i prefer for texturing but couldn't find it anymore. I can send you the brushfiles directly if you like.
I still haven't come to grips myself with the whole channel functions in gimp. For now i could do all my colouring work without using them, but i look forward to learning more about it from you in the future!

Keep on fiddling with all the settings and experiment a lot! As Ilanthar rightly said, sometimes a slight tuning has a huge effect, and i consider Ilanthar a grand-maître of this subtle magic!

[jfrazierjr]

Do you have all of your lineart on a single layer? If so, that is one thing I would HIGHLY suggest from a workflow perspective is to seperate everything as long as your machine has the ram to handle the image.

In your case, I would have, at a MINIMUM, layers for:

• land outline
• mountains line art
• waves
• forests

Then, anytime you make a selection for some reason, I almost always create a channel and/or a layer mask based upon such(depending on what I expect to do). The problem with putting it all on a single layer is that if you need to put a small blur on the outline of the island(for example), you then put that blur on all of the other line art which you don't want to do for the mountains and forest shapes(most likely anyway).

You have much of it already done, so you don't have to "redo" it all from scratch, what I would do is make use of some selections to create layer masks and the duplicate your line art later several times, changing the layer mask as needed. For example, your waves layer should be masked to the outermost shape of the island because you will never have waves INSIDE your island shape itself. Trust me, this keeps you from "accidents" that you don't see for days or weeks if you learn to use layer masks liberally(experience talking here).

[Chris Lewis]

You have a strong contrast between the land (bright) and the sea. Not a real problem, but it's really drawing your attention to the land, imo.
Your coastline looks a bit pixellated, maybe a "blur" filter could change that. I tend to not use pure black/white, and I think your coastline and ripples are too b/w. You can just play with opacity to correct that anyway, just as you mentionned.
Don't hesitate to play with opacity/layer effects. Sometimes, you just turn something good into something really great just by playing with your different layers settings .
Keep up the tests & tries, I'm confident you'll come with an excellent map .

Thank you for your input, Ilanthar! I will work on incorporating these tweaks into my next iteration.

Looks like you have come a long way with Abu's help, Chris

Have you tried experimenting with changing the mode of each layer yet? Its the drop down box just above the opacity setting. Overlay and multiply seem to be about the most useful.

I know you want to emulate the work of others, but you will develop your own style in time, and I like your ocean

EDIT: ninjad by Ilanthar! LOL!

Thank you, Mouse! Yes for each "Shallow Water" layer I put over the ocean, I went through ALL the modes to see what each did. I also adjusted the Opacity for each layer. That took some time but I think it was worth it. Some modes seemed to make a world of difference, and some didn't seem to do anything (to my untrained eye) I also changed the brush size, opacity, and style on each layer. I wanted to find one brush to use as Abu described but it seemed I needed to use several different brushes to achieve an effect similar to his.

Hey Chris, i'm glad to see this turned out so well! I can only wholeheartedly agree with Ilanthar and Mouse here and the great suggestions they made. I also would love to see the white coastal wavelines' layer set to overlay. Btw. i don't think they look horrible at all, but you also could "Filter>Blur" them for example, as Ilanthar suggested for the coastline.
The "smoothness" and blending of the layered brushstrokes also depends on the background texture and colour i think. The blue of your sea looks more saturated than on my example and the parchment texture you used is richer in contrast. I think this might have an effect on making the individual iterations of brushstrokes stand out more.
Ofc, using other brushes might be a good solution too. Not sure if you used the one shown in my screenshot (Acrylic 04#2). It is in the basic set and comes closest to the desired effect in my view. When doing this i searched the web to provide a link to the brush(set) i prefer for texturing but couldn't find it anymore. I can send you the brushfiles directly if you like.
I still haven't come to grips myself with the whole channel functions in gimp. For now i could do all my colouring work without using them, but i look forward to learning more about it from you in the future!

Keep on fiddling with all the settings and experiment a lot! As Ilanthar rightly said, sometimes a slight tuning has a huge effect, and i consider Ilanthar a grand-maître of this subtle magic!

Thank you for your reassurance, Abu I'll need to keep tweaking the layers to achieve the look you did and yes that makes sense about the parchment texture having an effect on the brushstrokes - I'll keep that in mind. As far as the brush, yes I started out using the same brush (Acrylic 04) but felt I had to use more "grungier" brushes to achieve a look that blended each stroke rather than leaving lines. I will search the GIMP add-on directory to see I can find an grungy brushes but yes, if and when you have time, I'd love to experiment with the brushes you used, if you could send them. For the channels, since you told me to use one for land, I experimented with using one for the 3 patches of vegetation. It seems that when you create a channel and then select it, it allows you to create a base layer color rather easily using the Bucket Fill tool, especially if you have several items created in that channel (e.g., the three forests). I think this is particularly useful when you have more than one item you're coloring and it keeps the base color consistent, and uses less mouse clicks

Do you have all of your lineart on a single layer? If so, that is one thing I would HIGHLY suggest from a workflow perspective is to seperate everything as long as your machine has the ram to handle the image.

In your case, I would have, at a MINIMUM, layers for:

• land outline
• mountains line art
• waves
• forests

Then, anytime you make a selection for some reason, I almost always create a channel and/or a layer mask based upon such(depending on what I expect to do). The problem with putting it all on a single layer is that if you need to put a small blur on the outline of the island(for example), you then put that blur on all of the other line art which you don't want to do for the mountains and forest shapes(most likely anyway).

You have much of it already done, so you don't have to "redo" it all from scratch, what I would do is make use of some selections to create layer masks and the duplicate your line art later several times, changing the layer mask as needed. For example, your waves layer should be masked to the outermost shape of the island because you will never have waves INSIDE your island shape itself. Trust me, this keeps you from "accidents" that you don't see for days or weeks if you learn to use layer masks liberally(experience talking here).

Thank you for the pointers, jfrazierjr. Yes, I have most of my linework on one layer. I did separate the coastal waves from the land though so this is something I will definitely work on in the future. I used layers on my last iteration and will certainly incorporate the use of them more as I progress. I'll try going back and duplicating/layering the linework layer so I can add that blur effect that Ilanthar mentioned above. Thank you for the reminder to use layers. I appreciate it.

[kacey]

I love watching the progress you're making in this thread, and all the support you're receiving from the community. How lucky to have someone as talented as Abu Lafia taking the time to write such detailed descriptions for you to learn from. I wish I had of had something like that when I was first starting out it's really great to see, and will help others as well.

I can't wait to see you continue to improve, I know it's difficult to do all this with a mouse, I can't even do a straight line with one, it always ends up being all jaggy and horrible... Keep it up, you've come a long way in a short time.