Layers woes

[davoush]

Hello,

I am having some trouble with textures, colouring, and layers. I should mention I am using Affinity Designer, which is very similar to Illustrator and also has the ability to create raster layers. Any advice coming from PS/AI users would be useful as well.

Long story short - I am unsure how to colour different areas of my map without the colours effecting each other, while maintaining the parchment texture look.

At the minute, I have the parchment set as the background with a colour 'layer' (each vector object is its own layer in AD). I make the 'colour layer' a paleish blue which is transparent enough for the texture detail to come through.

On top of this are all my continents. Now, when I colour the continents, it is either: 100% opacity with desired colour, but no texture can be seen. Or, less than 100% opacity (or a different mode such as overlay), and the blue colour effects the continent colour. The only solution I have found so far to maintain texture and be able to colour continents without ocean interfering is to image-fill each landmass with the texture. However, this means my document would have many, many pasted texture images for each landmass and tiny island - not ideal.

How do others get around this? I realise I may be missing a very obvious solution or I'm thinking too much in vector terms. For example, would you just rasterise the whole image and then manually paint the ocean, each continent, etc. separately so there are no unwanted colours lying under each other?

Warlin's wonderful Atlantide is an example of texture with separately coloured ocean and various areas:
https://www.cartographersguild.com/a...5&d=1482090984

Many thanks.