Thread: Radigast City (Flaenass, Oerth, Greyhawk Setting)

Originally Posted by IcarusATB

Lukc ...
you've done a wonderfully marvelous job on this one! This is one of the best Greyhawk maps that I have ever seen! I love the historicity that you've captured in making it look like an antique map from the Age of Exploration. I really love some of the old spellings that you used in the map key. This is the perfect synthesis of playability and real art.
I was wondering if you would mind talking about some of the techniques you used in making this fine map.
For example ... I assume you're working digitally, but, what software are you using? PS? Painter?
Also ... what did you go through to make the background look authentically water-painted like that? Did you use seperate layers for colours of it, or are you cloning a colour pattern?
Also, would it be possible to look at a pared down PSD or RIF, in order to see some of your techniques?
The world wants to know!

Oof, maybe I should really make a small tutorial on my texturing.

I started the map in photoshop, to draw the river and the coastline in pure black and white (no anti-aliasing, or anything) at a pretty high resolution. Then I took that map and used it to make a vector of the water and after that all the rest of the work was in illustrator. In Illustrator it done very simply, so it would also work in Inkscape or any other vector programme at all. Just layers and the pen tool, to be honest. Well, and the type tool.

The texturing was just an afterthought for a lower-res presentation version for here on the guild - I haven't even saved the .psd file I made for it (I just checked!). I usually age maps with a hue-saturation layer over the base art, then I add two copies of a texture, one as an overlay, below that a multiply version, and set up masks over those. I set to work on the masks with a noisy rough brush, so that the opacity of the texture is uneven, so I can emphasize areas that aren't so aged, or areas that are more aged. Then I might add a levels layer to tweak the visibility of things. Sometimes I'll use additional texture layers to add creases, more smudging, and so on. This one I think I actually painted the creases manually, with a thin brush and low opacity on the overlay layer.