WIP - Ascension's Photoshop Town Tutorial Follow-Along

[phatticus]

65. Add a layer style of pattern overlay of some rocks, blocks, or bricks pattern (I use something called rock10...it's in the zip file). You'll have to set the scale of the pattern to suit you so I went with 10%. This pattern is far too teal so I add a color overlay of a dark brown, hex code 4B4000 (RGB 75, 64, 0) set to color at 50% opacity. I like to do my castle as a big rectangle on one layer (called Castle) and then towers on another layer (called Castle towers). Next I'll add a stroke; black, outside, size is 2. Lastly, I'll add an inner glow of white set to screen at 75% opacity, size is 2 and choke is 100 to act as a parapet. Do not rotate anything yet.

NOTES: I used a brown rock tile from my library. It was too red, so I used a color overlay with a dark gray (55534e) to dull it out. In my case, my town sits against granite mountains of this color, and I wanted the castle to be made of the same stone. For the inner glow, I used a gray-green (85846d), which makes the parapets appear to be of the same material as the rest of the castle wall.

[phatticus]

66. Create a new layer and rename it to “Castle roof”. Grab the Rectangular Marquee tool. Click, hold, and drag out a rectangle to be used as a roof for a section of the castle. Click the paint bucket tool and fill this layer then deselect.
67. Add some layer styles. First, we get a pattern overlay of something that looks like roof tiles, shingles, or wooden planks (I use “red shingle roof” in the zip file) at a scale of 15%. I like my rich people to live under copper roofs so I add a color overlay of blue, hex code 004064 (RGB 0, 64, 100) set to color mode. This is too dark and so I add an inner glow of white; mode is screen at 25% opacity and size is 30. Next, I add an inner bevel, chisel soft, size is 21, angle is -45, altitude is 30, highlight mode is white at screen 50% opacity. Now it looks like weathered copper. Lastly, I'll add a 2-pixel black stroke to the outside.
68. If you want to rotate the castle then link the Castle layer and Castle tower layer and merge them together then link to the castle roof layer. You do this by looking at the layer stack, click on the castle layer, you will see an eye and a paintbrush, directly above the paintbrush is the Castle tower layer but it has an empty box instead of a paintbrush. If you click in the empty box a chain will appear...the layers are now linked together. Merge down (ctrl+e) and rename the layer to “Castle”. Click on the Castle roof layer and link it to the Castle layer. Now you can rotate and preserve any bevel properties on the roof (highlight and shadow) but not pattern, it always stays oriented to the page unless rasterized (the layer style has to become part of the layer itself instead of just being an effect). When we merged our Castle and Castle tower layers this rasterized the layer styles and allows us to rotate the castle and since our roof is linked but not merged the bevel will retain its orientation to the sun.

NOTES: I used a red cedar roof texture, which I darkened to give it a more weathered feel. I used a bevel to give it the appearance of shape.

[phatticus]

69. CURTAIN WALL
70. Now I need to put in a block wall around my castle. Keeping image scale in mind I choose the 6 pixel hard round pencil tip and draw a curtain wall. If you want to keep lines straight then click once to place a dot then hold down the shift key and then click again somewhere else on down the line. If this were a big city I'd make my wall thicker but since this is a village I probably should not even have a block wall...but who cares On the layer stack, right click on the castle layer and choose “copy layer style”. Right click on the block wall layer and choose “paste layer style”.
71. I want a gatehouse to cross the road leading in to my castle so I click on the castle layer. I draw out a rectangle with the rectangle marquee tool and then fill with the paint bucket. Since there are layer styles already built into this layer I don't have to do anything more unless I want to rotate the gatehouse. Once I have rotated then I deselect. If you try to rotate after deselecting then the whole layer will move.

NOTES: I wanted a stone wall around both the castle and the city, so I used a thicker brush (4px) for the curtain wall, and thinner crush (3px) for the city wall. I used the same stone texture for the walls that I used for the castle, such that the entire city appears to have been created from the same quarry stone.

[phatticus]

I wanted a covered stone bridge, so instead of following steps 75-80 I instead created a new layer and named it Bridges. I set the foreground color to white, and used the pencil to draw in a straight path bridge across my river. I then copied the style from "City Wall" layer and pasted onto this layer. Next, I duplicated the "Bridges" layer and named it "Bridge Roof". I cleared the style on this layer, and then copied and pasted the style from the Castle Roof. I played around with the sizing on the roof, and ultimately decided I like it covering the entire bridge, but keeping them in separate layers allows me to change my mind and remove the roof if I want.

I also increased the thickness of my city walls to give them a walkway for guards, and added gate houses to all the major entry points.

[phatticus]

81. Now we have to do something real tricky and I haven't yet mastered it ...making a shadow for this bridge. The first thing we need to do is create a new layer and rename it to “Bridge shadow”. On the layer stack move this layer beneath the bridge layer. Click on the Pen tool (it looks like a calligraphy pen). Pick one end of the bridge and make a click near the end in the middle. Click again where the water meets the sand. Cross the river and click on this side where the water meets the land. Click one last time on the middle of the bridge near the end. Right click on the Pen tool and change it to the Covert point tool (it looks like an upside down V). We will use the tool to modify our two interior nodes (points). So click on one and hold down. Drag the mouse and try to make the resulting curve “fit” the river bank. You'll have to use your judgment here. Do the same thing on the other interior node. Now click on the Brush tool and pick the same tip that we have been using for roads (27 soft round scaled up to 30). Click on the Paths tab. Make sure that your foreground color is black. At the bottom of the Paths tab you will see a ring, when you hover your mouse over that it will say “Stroke path with brush”. So click that and a line will appear along the path. If you like what you have then drag that path (on the path stack) to the trash can. If you don't like what you have then hit shift+ctrl+z to undo the stroke and then go back to editing your path with the various path tools (right click on the Covert tool and you will see the various tools available). Click back on the Layers tab and make any small adjustments by hand to the shadow. Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur = 10. Set the layer's opacity to 75%.

NOTES: I used 5 points for my path, I added a point in the center of the bridge so that I could get the shadow to fall on the water properly in the middle of the span.

[LonewandererD]

Whoa

That's a lot of posts to put up in one go. I like your idea, Ascension's tut is great and now that someone is showing a step by step process it can help others to understadn it a little better. A few notes though, mayeb you should move away from using blue in your posts, its a little hard to read. Some of the streets on the northern side of the river are meeting at odd angels, making triangular plots of land that look like it would be difficult to place a house on it. Finally, I think you may have made a mistake in making the land, I've used the same process and I remember the land looking rougher, yours looks a little too blurred. I could be wrong though, I'm sure Ascension will pop around soon to clarify this.

Rep for the effort.

-D-

[phatticus]

NOTES: Steps 82-85 in the tutorial are intended to create wooden platforms for the gatehouses in the palisades. Since I am using stone gate houses, I skipped these steps.

86. FOOTINGS
87. If you have some really long bridges then you're going to need some support in the middle. I choose to do mine in stone since they will be sitting in the river (wood will get pummeled and destroyed in floods). Create a new layer and on the layer stack, drag this layer underneath of the bridge layer. Grab a square pencil of a size big enough to be sturdy for your bridge. Click, hold, and drag out a line big enough to be seen then add some layer styles. Stroke, 2 pixels and black; pattern overlay of the rock10 pattern at 5% scale; color overlay of brown, hex code 4B4000 (RGB 75, 64, 0) set to hue at 75% opacity; and an inner bevel chisel soft. Use the Marquee tool to make a selection around this chunk and rotate it to fit the bridge properly (that is, perpendicularly). Draw out some more lines and marquee them and rotate them if necessary. If you plan to put in a mill along the river, which I do, then we will be adding more footings later.
88. Hold down the ctrl key then click on the icon (in the layer stack) for “create a new layer”. This will create a new layer underneath of the footings layer. Rename this layer to “foam”. Grab the Brush tool, if you do not see it then right click on the Pencil tool and change it. Change the tip so the soft round 3 pixel tip and at the top of the screen, change the flow to 20%. Now draw in some squiggly lines that make it look like water flowing around the footings. If you plan to put in a mill then we will be doing some more squiggles later.

NOTES: For the foam, I set the foreground color to white, and drew in the foam lines with a 5px soft tip brush. I then selected the smudge tool, again with a 5px tip, and smudged over all the lines until I got the result I wanted

[phatticus]

89. MILL
90. So let's get that out of the way right now. We will start out with the same process that we used for the bridges so we will use a line as before and we will also use something bigger. We will add a new wrinkle as well, though.
91. First things first. Create a new layer. Now we need to keep our scale in mind. Since my roads are roughly 10 feet wide and I used a 19 pixel tip that means that my scale is about 6 inches per pixel. I'll start with a 20 pixel hard square tip on my pencil. I'll make 4 clicks, one right next the other so that my building is 40 feet long. Ctrl+click on this layer in the layer stack, duplicate this layer, Filter > Noise > Add Noise = 400%, Filter > Blur > Motion Blur = 90 degree, distance 10, deselect, merge down. On the layer stack, right click on the bridge layer, choose “copy layer style”, click back on this mill layer and right click and select “paste layer style”. This is going to be our roof but it's flat right now. I could add an inner bevel chisel soft but I don't want that kind of roof for a simple village. Instead I'm going to add a gradient overlay to simulate the roof shading.
92. This gradient is going to be a little tricky if you've never edited a gradient before. So click on the cursive F at the bottom of the layer stack and pick “gradient overlay”. The first thing that we are going to do is change the blend mode to overlay. Next, you will see a little preview of what the gradient looks like, it should be black to white, so click on this. This brings up the Gradient editor. The sliders along the top are for opacity and we'll leave these alone for now. The sliders along the bottom are for color. Click, hold, and drag the white slider to the middle at 50. If you hover your mouse just under the gradient then your pointer should turn into a hand and this will let you add a new slider if you click...so do that. Click, hold, and drag this slider all the way to the right. At the bottom of this screen you will see the word “color” with a box next to it. Click on that box and bring up the Color Picker (you can also just double click on the slider). Change this color to something of a light gray, I went with C0C0C0 (RGB 192, 192, 192). Add another slider and change this to something of a medium gray, I went with A0A0A0 (RGB 160, 160, 160). Now click, hold, and drag this slider to the middle at 50. Here's the tricky part...a slight movement, either to the left or right, can change the gradient here. What we want is a gradient that goes from black to medium gray then forms a hard edge with white and goes to light gray. If we move just to the left a hair it will change to black to white, medium gray to light gray. You might want to save this gradient for future use (we will be using it again). To do this, type in a name (where it says “custom”) and lick on the “New” button. The “Save” button saves the whole set of gradients to a file so that you can upload that file and share it with others. Lastly, we need to think of where the sun is. For me, it's in the lower right so I need to hit the box that says “Reverse”. Do not rotate this shape just yet, we have more stuff to add.

Sicne I am using stone city walls, I needed to manually define the styles for the mill. I used the values from the section of the tutorial where the bridge was constructed, as that seemed like the best option.

[phatticus]

93. Grain mills are usually arranged with at least 2 floors, I'll explain in a bit. So make a larger square with the Rectangular Marquee tool (hold down the shift key to keep it square), create a new layer, grab the Paint Bucket tool and fill with black, then repeat the process from the previous step (noise, motion blur, color, gradient, etc). On the layer stack, link this layer to the mill layer. Create a new layer. Now change the pencil tip to something smaller and draw an upside down T, this is going to be our waterwheel. Again, do the noise, motion blur, and color overlay but omit the gradient. Link this layer up as well. The reason that mills had multiple floors is that the moving parts were often loud and caused injuries (you could lose an arm in the gears and no one wants to buy bloody flour) so only the millers were allowed up hwere. The waterwheel was connected to a horizontal beam with gears on it that connected to a vertical beam with gears on it which was connected to a horizontal grindstone to grind the grain into flour. This didn't matter for saw mills, though. The actual moving parts were usually on the top floor (I'm not sure why that is but it is) and the lower floors were for packaging, baking, and sleeping. Having mills on the river was also a benefit because the moving parts often caused fires, especially in the dry winter air (lots of static electricity).

[phatticus]

94. I also put a deck around the mill in the same way that I did the platforms for the gatehouses. Then I put a railing in so that people won't fall into the river. This was just a 1 pixel pencil and then given a brown color overlay. Next, I put in some steps. For these, I did the usual noise, blur, color overlay, but the gradient was different...it was black to white, black to white, black to white, and black to white. The black to white was gradual but there is that hard edge where white turns back in to black like we did for the mill roof...these hard edges were at 25, 50, and 75 so that means there is a black slider at 0, 25, 50, and 75 and a white slider at 25, 50, 75, and 100. Lastly, I merged all of these layers together and then rotated it to fit the angle of the river. I then finished it off with some more footings on that layer and some foam on that layer.
95. With this done I went and moved the bridge and mill layers beneath the roads, then airbrushed some road onto the mill steps and bridges to look like wear spots.