Hanlon

[Jkaen]

Hi guys,

As requested in my intro thread here are the WIP shots of my creation of a map for my DM. I have attached the base map I am working from as well as the current WIP for feedback.

A few quick comments on making this:

A. Lots of little islands were a pain, even now some have merged together, it made setting a sea mask much trickier than it would have been otherwise

B. The boundaries between the features is harsher than I would have liked, the most succesful way I had found to soften them was to turn down the whole layer's opacity

C. I completely lost what was happening for the rivers (and the lake) in the tutorial I was following, so I have just made them as 2 layers, the blue and a black. to make the black line I traced the blue layer with a thicker brush, I cannot believe this was the most efficient way

Any comments on presentation are welcome, my hands are a bit tied with what goes where thoguh obviously (hence I can't for example do anyting about having rivers starting and ending inland)

[töff]

You got the same problem with rivers, as I got. Where they meet the sea, they just don't look right.

[Jkaen]

I agree, I think its because it doesn't effect the coastline effect at all, I may have to add in by hand some sort of white 'wash' effect. Will have to look at what rivers look like when they hit the sea though, as I don't know how far off the coast you would take it (or how far up river for that matter)

[ravells]

What software are you using, Jkaen, and do you have a tablet and pen?

[Jkaen]

GIMP and no

[ravells]

Thanks, I don't know if it's a stylistic issue that you want the islands not to have a detailed coastline, but if you do, then I recommend RobA's tutorial here, written for Gimp. You can use the coastlines you already have, islands and all and make them more fractally.

I think using the sea as a mask might be counterproductive. It might be better to have it as a base layer and have your land on top in other layers. If you want to make adjustments to a landmass, you can just mask the layer its on and paint out the bits you don't want.

It looks like you're using a pattern fill to make the features. You might want to use a brush instead although it depends on the feel you want to achieve. Is there another map you can post which shows what you have in mind (roughly?) it'll be a great help in terms of getting answers as to how to get there. If you'd just like a softer border between the features and the underlying land colour, then select the features and use the 'feather' command. That should give you a softer transition.

I'm not a Gimp user, but one quick way to make a black outline for your rivers (in photoshop you'd just use a stroke command on the selection, but I have a feeling Gimp doesn't support that - but if it does then that's the easiest way) is to draw your rivers in black on a new layer and select them. Shrink the selection by the number of pixels you want the stroke width to be (I would guess one or two) and then fill the new selection with blue. Image below to show you the effect (but done in photoshop).

Oh, and get a tablet, it's really worth it if you want to spend time drawing maps - especially useful for rivers. If you're using a mouse I've just posted up a tutorial on drawing rivers with a mouse in photoshop, but I don't know if Gimp has the same functionality.

Cheers

Ravs

[Jkaen]

Just thought I would come back with the latest version of the map.

Its my understanding that the DM is finally happy with this version. Been a good learning experience, although I have ended up with a crazy amount of layers as a result of all the revisions.

[Steel General]

You can never have "to many" layers (and you can always flatten and/or group them).

I like the look overall, resembles some of my earlier attempts. I'm not a big fan of the really smooth coasts, but that's just me. If you're happy with it and your GM is happy that's all that matters.

[Jkaen]

I thought about roughening them up, but given its quite zoomed out I didn't think it would look right. However just looking at a map of europe I see I am wrong and it should be rougher, will do that next time though

[Ghostman]

Well Europe has a very broken coastline (compare it to Africa, which is a much larger landmass but has a shorter coastline!) so it's not like a fictional map needs to replicate it to that level. Even so I would agree that the coast in your map is a bit too smooth to look good.

There is another thing I see that you might want to improve in your future maps: when using the technique of blurring the layer masks (as you did on this map), you should take care to keep the elements from spilling over to the water. If you look closely, you can see that this has happened in the attached picture. The forests and the mountains in particular extend a visible blurred edge to the sea.

There is an easy way to fix it: after applying the blur, make a selection of the water-area, click on the mask of the layer, and fill the selection with black color. This way the blurs will disappear from the water areas but they will remain over the land areas.