January 2008 Entry: a thousand welcomes

[The Cartographist]

Really nice work - really like it a lot. Great job.

[ravells]

You are really becoming the master of the motif, GP - this is beautiful! Did you draw the mosque and villa by hand?

[Gamerprinter]

You are really becoming the master of the motif, GP - this is beautiful! Did you draw the mosque and villa by hand?

Yes, Ravs, I hand drew the mosque and the villa. The mosque is actually in Baghdad from a photo I found online, the villa from my head - I couldn't find a photo of a period merchant villa, so I guessed.

Although I didn't hand-draw the card cover - in my head, I thought "scribe" well these means "scribbling" not clipart placement.

In case anyone wants the map objects of the villa and mosque, I can make these available. (It feels good to get done with the challenge this early!)

[RPMiller]

There is a lot of aliasing happening with your scanned lines that detracts from the overall beauty of the map especially in the river. You might want to consider either tracing over the lines, or multiplying the color with the image, or drawing with a harder line that is easier to clean up. Other than that this is a beaut of an entry.

[Gamerprinter]

RP... for the first time a Xara file ended up with a fatal error. I can't open the map in Xara - it just crashes. So unless I recreate the map from scratch, its going to be tough to fix.

I opened the JPG file in Photoshop using a cloner brush to get rid of the lines on the canal, replacing with just a solid blue, then typing in the text.

There are other tiny aliasing issues on the map - the only way to truly fix this is to recreate then entire map page again. Although I may do this, I don't really have the time this week. If I get time towards the end of the month, I may fix this. Otherwise I'll just settle for slight painting changes in PS to get this done.

New WIP of map - adjusted in Photoshop...

### Winner ###