August Entry: Compass Blade

I'm not good at drawing stuff outside of maps, so I'm looking at a variety of styles of roses that I can use that are simple and that I can draw in a vector program.

My two ideas are a wax seal rose and something pointy and blade-like.

I'm going to try doing the wax seal one another day, and thought I should try hashing out the basics for the blade-like one in CorelDraw.

Here's a first design impression for it - fresh out of CorelDraw before I drop it into Photoshop to add texture and lighting and so on...

Alright... not happy with how that one was going, I decided to try out the wax seal idea.

I took the central element from the blade rose and used it for this wax seal rose. This is a jpg of the rough version, but I can also release a layered version with transparency.

Well so much for my attempt... ;)

Okay, that wax seal is awesome. What app did you make it in?

I'm not sure I like how dark the edges are--though of course some will be needed for depth. Also I think a little texture would add life--although I'm not sure what "wax texture" really looks like :)

This is great, just great.

Made the seal in photoshop.

Here's the seal on a half-completed map.

I like the wax seal idea... see how it looks on a black BG... i think it would stand out better. You'd be amazed at how much difference a different colored BG can make in an image. doubly so with darker shades of red.