Photo 5 of 5 from Portfolio

Comprehensive Map of the Kingdoms and Principalities in Aran & Ilan

Photo Added
04-04-2016, 02:34 AM
Album
Portfolio
Added by
Caenwyr

Photo Comments

  1. CharlesRobinson
    Wow! I love the design with the data on the left and the smaller maps in the opposite corners. You made great use of your space!
  2. Klaradox
    Wonderful. I have a technical question: How do you create the (dark) lines in the water? They "flow" around the land masses according to the shape of those lands. How do you distort them like that?
  3. Caenwyr
    Thanks for the compliments guys! About your question, Klaradox, I can't really recall the details, but the general idea was to do the following process over and over again:
    1. select the sea surface, invert selection (so your actual selection is the landmasses)
    2. expand the selection with a few pixels
    3. turn the selection into a path
    4. stroke the path with your favourite brush
    5. return the path to a selection

    And then repeat steps 2 through 5 until the entire area is covered. I didn't do this by hand, obviously. I only did it once while recording it as a little script, and rand the script a 100 times or something around that number.

    An easier, but slightly sloppier way of doing this would be to stroke the selection itself instead of turning it into a path first. But that way you can't choose the brush it uses, and the expansion tend to get really really regular (with straight lines), while going back and forth between selections and paths helps inject some quirkiness that I found quite charming. And since you're not doing it manually anyway, the extra complexity doesn't really matter. Make sure to save your work before running the script though - it can​ be heavy on the processor
  4. henningt
    Woow it looks SO great.
    What are you useing to make the maps whit?
  5. kacey
    One of my all time favourites, I really love this map.
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