Well, at least no one can ever accuse me of delivering a straightforward explanation
Haha! I am glad you added that last line as I ended up more confused. Phone boxes? B&W photography?
I do think I get it now though. If you spill red wine and then rub some bicarb into it it goes a purplish blue but this fades over time to an increasingly grey colour that eventually disappears altogether. The blueness is being 'washed out' by the light.
I'm going to mess about a bit and see what I can come up with. Thinking about it the type of ink used to draw this map would most likely be ferric tannate, or what was called iron gall ink. The tannin was extracted from oak galls - you know those ball things that form when wasps lay their eggs in the leaf buds? This is reacted with a source of iron and produces a blackish/purplish/grey that when fixed with a gum forms a very persistent ink. The map would probably have been drawn by one of those monks or whatever they are in that weird college place on that island in the west. They tend to wander about a lot, drinking in the local taverns and bothering people about how talented their kids are. Them posh buggers up in the city pay a fortune to send their kids there you know.
So yeah ferric tannate it is
Well, at least no one can ever accuse me of delivering a straightforward explanation
Thanks johnvv - it sort of confirms what I was thinking. It's like something is left in the window and the sun bleaches it or a T-shirt that's gone too many times in the wash. The colour gets washed out but at the same time the dullness increases. I think I get what Mouse was saying with the phone box and photographs now too.
Nice to see a fellow Linux user too
Seeing those images I've just decided I don't like my south coast. It's obvious that I reached the bottom of the page and went 'flat', like I've crammed everything in there. It doesn't look natural. In fact it looks like the cartographer took a hacksaw to the land because he or she ran out of vellum.
practice
it takes time to learn new skills
and the maps i maps ( more textures for 3d objects) i have been doing for many years
a few yeas longer than a linux user
went Microsoft free in 2005 , after a few years using MinGW and CygWin
--- 90 seconds to Midnight ---
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--- Penguin power!!! ---
At the size you're working with you shouldn't have to down sample this at all. I generally don't do anything smaller then 5700 pixels across, and I'm able to upload my images to the forum at full size just by saving it as a jpeg, and pushing down the quality slider from 12 to 11 without loosing much quality or detail. I spent allot of time reducing the image size, and using png because I'm always hearing that jpeg is suppose to be bad, but I've had better luck not changing the size at all, and using jpeg and only going slightly lower on the quality slider. It seems like the forum accepts anything at 9.4mb or smaller, anything bigger and I'm not able to get it to load onto the forum.
I really feel like you're line work on the mountains, and coast should be thinner, the thicker lines look a little pixilated to me, and I know you're trying to make it look like some type of special ink, but in all honesty I just don't think it's working, I really think the line work would look much better if it were black or dark brown, I think the blue looks a little odd. I've mentiond this to Mouse before, but sometimes making something more visually appealing trumps accuracy of the time period... In my opinion.
And btw that comment about the buttered cat cracked me up, and Mouse really is a gem on the forum.
Edit: I almost forgot to mention that you being new to gimp, and only using a mouse is amazing, I could never in a million years do what you've done with a mouse, and being new to making maps, and the software it's pretty impressive that you've been able to pull this off so far.
Last edited by kacey; 11-21-2016 at 02:45 AM.
I'm currently working on a new ink It will be more of a black. I've got a few things to do on this, it's turning into an epic isn't it?
I'm getting quite a lot of guidance on this. Thanks everyone
I've 'colourised' the coastline because I didn't fancy drawing it again, and I have redone the mountains in the same (ish) colour. The text uses the same colour as the mountains.
There's something not right. When I click to add an image the box comes up but without the browse button. I can retrieve from URL but not from my computer.
new kassandria.jpg
Ah, after 4 or 5 goes it finally appeared properly. And it's choose file not browse.