If only there was a tutorial! This is stunning.
Woah, the detailing is incredible! It would take me hours just to come up with the house layout
~Unless otherwise stated by me, all work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License.
Really beautiful map. Love the details and mixed cultural flair.
BOB
I'm wondering how you get this good? Smoothing out bitmaps with Illustrator? Editing smart objects?
Do you take classes? Do you just read tutorials and figure it out on your own?
Do you know someone who teaches you this stuff?
I always come back to this map for a boost of inspiration.
I've been using Photoshop forever but taking into consideration how long.. I should be a lot more prolific, at least in my opinion because there is so much I don't know. But, Photoshop is kind of like a toy/tool with infinite possibilities so you really have to be adventurous. Most of what i DO know is self taught but i did take some starter classes for the programs a long long time ago. It's truly amazing how much you can learn in a very short time just by doing tutorials and messing around with a project whether in or out of your comfort zone as far as subject matter is concerned... Cartographers guild has helped me immensely as well. Really I only started stepping up my map skills a couple years ago. Eventually I will do a tutorial for the Sheinar style, when i get time, because while it looks pretty detailed the actual method is simpler than it seems. Actually I'm just starting to do some freestyle tablet drawing/painting and it's really hard for me because i'm so used to using a mouse!
The city map looks amazing, I really like the textures of the fields and the water and I hope, we can expect a tutorial or some rough steps soon.
do you remember how you did the buildings? You have good randomness and good alternate colors. I say you posted the buildings as all black somewhere back in the thread. Was this just blocks built in illustrator, placed in photoshop, beveled and color added?
http://gyazo.com/cd4b2121fa1f8e39a52d6fb9b6579c3d
I'm interested in your method for creating trees. They're absolutely beautiful.
What a wonderfully gorgeous map!
The earth tone of the buildings provides a very nice contrast to the green of the surrounding countryside. The dark water looks great, again due to the contrast it provides for the human eye seeking to absorb this thing.
You have skimped on the use of text, and the text doesn't dominate the visual. This is a prime example of where less equaled more. Very nice touch!
The buildings are primarily roofs, with the focus on the geometric shapes, rather than on the details of the buildings, themselves. This is the driving brainstorm behind this artistic masterpiece. Truly, the buildings are a visual extravaganza, a feast for the eyes!
The harbors come across as largely bare. The plain roofs don't work as well, there. A ship or three would have added visual interest to that segment of the map, but in all honesty, that's merely an exercise in nitpicking. This map exceeds the value of its individual parts to the degree that no criticism of it really sticks, for when all is said and done, what is there to complain about? It's a beautiful map, and on that charge, there can be no contestation of note or consequence.
The green spaces inter-spliced with the buildings yields a more believable end product. Grass, trees, and bushes with such little detail. but yet, with detail from green space to green space. It all adds up and fuels the engine of success for this baby of a map.
Zoomed in, the font work really works nicely on this map. It fits the map to a tee.
The Sun Chamber I'm not a fan of. The shiny aspect of the domes on it are the issue with it for me, and not so much the shape of the domes. They remind me of buttons or snaps placed on an otherwise nearly flawless map.
I don't care for the compass rose, but the quality of the overall map is so high, that it utterly dwarfs the existence of the compass rose, thereby rendering it to be a complain of no substantial and lasting consequence.
All in all, I have much admiration for this map!