City of Gullside - AidyBaby

[Robbie]

Map (Click to enlarge)




Created in: Photoshop

Review
The City of GullSide is a map by a brand new member AidyBaby. Its a very well executed map, not only because of its style, but because of the techniques used. AidyBaby has gone out of his way to share with the community his methods and resources, even citing inspiration from one of the tutorials featured on this site. Definitely check out the original thread and this map, its a beauty!

Artists Notes
Gullside is a large fortified town set in anyone's imagination. I wanted to create a 'traditional' temperate walled town/city that included most of the standard features seen in these types of maps as a sort of challenge to me to see if I could do it justice - I hope you like it.

My main goal was to make a map with a distinctive style but something that hopefully would appeal to most people. I also wanted to develop techniques for my future maps that hopefully would help speed up the process of creating medium scale overland maps. I started out trying to follow Pyrandon's great city tutorial, but I wanted more distinctive buildings that Don's 'suggestively realistic' technique doesn't produce. I also didn't want to draw every building individually (phew!), so I decided to create a buildings pattern that would be repeated on the map to cut down on drawing time. I made it large enough so that it wouldn't be easy to pick out the repeating pattern. This really formed the basis for the map - I simply used a layer mask to 'erase-out' the buildings I didn't want, which is much faster than drawing.

The trees are hand drawn and after several very poor attempts I managed to get something that worked!! Personally this is the part of the map that gives me the most satisfaction. I intend to do a tutorial on how I made the map, so I won't go into detail but it was simply the spatter brush that ships with PS with some mods to the brush dynamics.

The colour of each layer is seperately controlled with its own hue/saturation adjustment layer (and sometimes levels). That allows individual control of all the colours of all the layers to give the final (and tweakable) colour balance. I also like to use the clouds filter (black and white) set in overlay mode to create random dark and light shading on individual layers to add variation.

Most layers make use of several layer effects to give depth and texture and the overall tone of the map is further adjusted with another hue/saturation adjustment layer.

I'm looking forward to getting the time to expand the area around Gullside in future maps.

Good luck with your maps - AidyBaby

Original Thread
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