Quote Originally Posted by torstan View Post
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.