Wood-cut effect [Serif Drawplus - vector app]

[ravells]

Here is a quick doodle of a woodcut effect I was looking to try and achieve using Serif Drawplus, a cheaper version of illustrator. I'm sure that someone who is familiar with CC3, Inkscape and other vector apps can find similar commands to get the same effect.

Here's how I did it.

1. Draw your coastline and islands and fill them with black, no line.
2. On a new layer, draw a very thin black rectangle running along the bottom margin and copy it to the top. Blend the bottom to the top (I used a setting of 75), this gives you a number equally distributed parallel rectangles.
3. Select all the rectangles and combine them into a poly shape (this means that the 'white' between the rectangles becomes transparent.
4. Go back to your coastlines, cut all and paste everything onto the layer with the parallel rectangles.
5. Select all and make them into a poly shape.
6. With everything still selected, use the roughen/ fractal tool to taste.
7. To get the blue background, I just popped in a blue rectangle in a lower layer.

You can alter the effect to suit by adjusting the height and number of rectangles and the amount of roughen.

You can make some simple, atmospheric pictures with it too, using silhouettes. I got the silhouette of the woman from a font (I think from the online Da Font library) which I converted to curves.