Horizontal Ocean Lines Test

[dansheffler]

Not sure if this is the best forum as this is my first post, but I am trying to imitate the hand-drawn look of the ocean lines in this map by Schley:

http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...al-Fantasy-Map

I realize that I could create paths that stop short of the cost and stroke each one with simulated pressure, but I wanted to construct a technique that could be easily and quickly applied to future work without all the tedium of drawing each path by hand. Here is what I have so far:



In CS5 here is what I did:

1. created paths that went clear across the canvas horizontally with snap to grid turned on. Copy and pasted these all the way down.
2. Set the brush to a hard round brush with quite a bit of size jitter and scatter. Stroked the path with this.
3. In a layer on top of the "lines" layer painted over the area around the land with a white brush with a gradient around the edge. (select land, expand, feather, paint).
4. Set this layer's blend mode to disolve. Flatten this with the line's layer.
5. Applied the "accent edges" filter to get the lines to tapper and sputter out.

#5 is the key step since what I liked best about the lines in Shley's map was the way they trail off like inked lines would. Does anyone have any other advice on how to do this better or more easily? I'm really new both to photoshop and mapmaking so any hints are appreciated.

[skamradt]

Another trick for creating hand drawn lines from straight ones is to use the free Melt plugin from http://mehdiplugins.com/

Here are two lines, one at 2 pixels and one at one pixel, with the melt parameters set to size:10 Amount:1

[RobA]

...Moved to the Tutorial forum (The WIP forum is for actual maps that are Works in Progress)...

Also, here is another technique to achieve the fading woodcut lines that may provide some inspirations

http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...rial)(-in-GIMP)

-Rob A>