January 2011 Entry: Deep in the Wood

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Something I learned from Jezelf through studying Ramah's work... select your item, whether it be a line or some text or a landmass; stroke it with a dark color on the outside, inverse selection, then put a gaussian blur on it. Depending upon the color and size of the stroke and the size of the blur radius, you can come up with some really nice effects. This is a technique I didn't know before trying to reverse-engineer Ramah's shorelines. It's a lot like an outer glow, but more flexible, and you can use the selection mask to point it in one direction or the other, or no mask for both directions.

Oh and the background is really, really complex. It has so many textures embedded into it you can't see some of them anymore. One texture that is almost gone is some Latin monk scribblings in white. That along with the east-west fiber texture that I finally settled on to approximate Ramah's hint of brushed metal look gives the background a hint of shimmer. Look at Vaniya around the legend and you'll see a similar effect.