S John Ross is a dirty, dirty man...
S John Ross is a dirty, dirty man...
I had noticed a certain lowering of the tone whenever he pops up.... though the firefly references add a whole new depth.
I'd sketch the shape you are after roughly on one layer, not worrying about much other than a nice shape. Then I'd locate major features like rivers and mountain ranges on a new layer. As Ghalev says, note how they affect the coastline - google maps is the best way to nail this. Then rebuild your sketch on a new layer with these effects in mind. That should give you a believable shape. Finally. go around the coast carefully with a fine brush and allow your hand to squiggle as you do. I find that my own hand jitter is lot better than any built in jitter.
I don't have art rage, so these are my steps in Gimp. They should work fine in other programs though. It's also an interesting exercise to import a real image of a coastline and trace around the edge. You can always rotate and/or flip it, to make sure no one will notice where it is.
That's a good point, Torstan. It's also sometimes useful to use, say, an island and rescale it for use as a continent. Not many people are likely to recognize the shape of a random Philippine island, especially if it's being used to represent something much larger.
Bryan Ray, visual effects artist
http://www.bryanray.name
That's a great idea, actually. I remember having a student teacher in my Junior year of high school who took the Philippines (I think) and turned the whole island chain into the landmasses of a world...
also, something I've noticed in fantasy-themed video games is that most of them tend to take a map of the Mediterranean and deform, rotate, whatever it to turn it into a world. I think I might try this. :3
"Is Eris true?"
"Everything is true."
"Even false things?"
"Even false things are true."
"How can that be?"
"I don’t know man, I didn’t do it."
~ The Principia Discordia 5th ed., Introduction