Errispa

[Voolf]

This is shaping up so nicely Mouse. I feel lots of REPs in the air...

[BlindBlake]

Very nice work so far, can't wait to see the final map!

[Mouse]

This is shaping up so nicely Mouse. I feel lots of REPs in the air...

Thanks Voolf

Very nice work so far, can't wait to see the final map!

Thank you BlindBlake - I will try not to disappoint!

Before I start to really get down to it I have to sort out my entry to the Draw a Battleship Challenge. I also need to seriously consider what I'm going to draw around the margin as the decoration before I make a commitment to a drawing that could take a couple of weeks to complete from start to finish. I've seen some very impressive vintage maps - all of them very different in style. The classical themes seem to incorporate pastoral or biblical scenes, but since this is a map drawn by someone from an alien culture who has never heard of any of our deities, I may just have to illustrate with themes from the Ruzarian belief system, which involves a stream of the dead spiralling up from Ethran to Errispa - their version of heaven. Domar would only be drawing this to pacify the Sayers, however, because he doesn't believe in any of that silly rot. They are, however, the all-powerful guardians of the Ruzarian faith and quite likely to subject him to some kind of inquisition if he depicts anything other than the stories contained in the Holy Scripture. They also pay him for his services as an astronomer.

On the other hand... if he gives it a theme that is overly religious they might just take it away and claim it as their own which would never do, since Domar intends the Book of Errispa (to which this is merely the cover design), to be his grandson's 'ticket to ride' with whoever seems to stand the best chance of making it across the void.

[Ilanthar]

You're moving fast on this! And I really like what you have so far. The old classy globe feel is very well done.

[Mouse]

Thanks Ilanthar

Now I feel really nervous about drawing the border! LOL!

I'm just going to enjoy it and see what happens

[jfrazierjr]

Continuing from the other thread. Is this:
MousesMap.png

Even remotely what you were thinking of? It was about as close as I could get on the border to be close to what was in that PS tutorial. There may be some existing scripts what would work faster and easier, but this is at least kind of close with a few minutes work.

[Mouse]

Why yes

That's it!

How did you do it?

[jfrazierjr]

Why yes

That's it!

How did you do it?

quite a bit of screwing around....lol At a high level, I:

Created a selection
Created a Channel (Select->Save to Channel)
Created a new layer named "border color"
Filled "Border color" with 87681e (exactly the same color as on the video!)
Added a layer mask to "border color" and picked the channel I saved a few seconds ago. In this case, I had to invert the mask on the layer mask dialog.
Added a second layer named "bumpy noise"
Set this layer to OVERLAY
Add the same channel as a Layer mask to "Bumpy noise"(remember to invert if you need to).

Now.. at this point is where you have to just do a bunch of playing around. ALL of the below is done on the "Bumpy noise" layer.

First is Filter->Render->Clouds->Solid Noise and jack the X and Y up quite a bit. Alternately, you could choose Plasma, but if you DO use plasma, you will need to Color->Desaturate to turn into a B/W layer
Then apply various other filters (at various times I tried Filters->Artistic->Oilify, Filters-Noise-Slur and perhaps a few others).
Eventually, when you get a some random patterns you like, Filters->Map->Bump Map. You have to play with the various settings, but mainly Elevation, Depth, and Ambient, and possibly the MapType.
Finally, the bumps were a bit too sharp, so I applied a very small amount(3-4 px) of Gaussian Blur(or not, to taste)

Unfortunately, GIMP does not make this process as easy as PS(layer effects), but many times the results are reproducible or fairly close.

Note, you could skip the save to channel step, but as I mentioned elsewhere, saving the channel makes it far easier to edit things later, so I try to remember to do this(but fail some times). You COULD just apply the mask using the selection to both layers.

[jfrazierjr]

Oh.. one other thing.. there were a few sections which were really dark or really light, so I used the blur/dodge tool and hit them a few times to change the "exposure" of the area under the brush I had selected, again, on the bumpy noise layer.

[Mouse]

o....k....

I may be... some considerable time....

LOL!

Thanks for all the support and help - and especially for sorting out this gold leaf problem for me!