Untitled (as yet) map

[Ramah]

Thanks guys.

As to doing the whole map in this style... it wasn't the plan and I'm not sure I would be up to it. Then again, my plans for the map keep changing so who knows. My attempts so far at rendering towns and cities have been terrible, although I wouldn't have classed them as "this style" either.

Ah well... first I'll finish the sea and then try and decide on a forest style.

Thanks for the encouragement.

[Clercon]

This look fantastic. Keep up the good work :-)

[Sapiento]

Looks fantastic, Ramah! Are the borders (vines etc.) all hand drawn or do you use templates?
The waves look superb!

[Ramah]

Cheers Sap.

Yes, the borders are all hand drawn. For the middle section of the top left corner of vines I did sorta copy the layout of a vector image I found, just to get some idea of how to do it. This was then weaved in to other vines I added.

[Ramah]

Just about finished the waves now. Need to make a few small adjustments here and there but they are 99% finished (not exactly sure how I am gonna handle that gulf in the SE corner.. I tried adding some waves but they looked pretty bad... might just leave it calm like it is now). I'm showing them at 100% visibility right now but in the finished map I will probably tone them down a bunch so as not to draw too much attention away from the landmass.

[torstan]

I agree with everyone on the waves - they're looking pretty great. Probably some lower level chop/ripples in the SE gulf? There wouldn't be big waves there, but a bit of something will stop it looking bare. What did you do over the paper background to get your sea colours - overlay? colour burn? It looks great.

[arsheesh]

Wow, that's incredible! I love the waves and the vine border! Can't wait to see the finished product.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

[Ascension]

Down near the gulf, between two islands you have a little wavelet, something like that might fit the gulf.

[Ramah]

What did you do over the paper background to get your sea colours - overlay? colour burn? It looks great.

The sea colour is four layers in total (and the paper texture underneath them all of course), two of which being the darker area around the landmass. Of the two layers that are the main colour though...

The first is a light blue colour and is painted reasonably roughly so that not all the area has full opaque coverage. It's then set to Darken with opacity at 50%. The second layer is more like a large stroke around the landmass which I dragged around with the smudge tool to get a less uniform shape than a gaussian blur would have given me. It's pretty much the same colour but this is set to Colour Burn and again set at 50% opacity.

That gives me the colours you see in the screeny I posted before the last one. This last image I posted I added an adjustment layer to desaturate the whole image... well.. another method, not an adjustment layer but it amounts to the same thing.


As for adding waves to the empty gulf area.. I did try adding some waves (in fact I still have them masked out at the moment) but it all look a little too busy and generally... sucky. I'll have another crack at it before I'm done I'm sure but at the moment I have a mask ready to apply which all but eliminates a lot of the waves leaving them looking more like waves seen through mist and makes them much less intrusive. Seen like this then the area doesn't really look empty. I guess I'll do some more experimenting but for now I'll try and sort out what to do with the landmass.

[torstan]

Thanks for that - interesting to see how other people do things. I don't use darken at all - I'll have to play with that.