Gaddoc Fenn

[Daelin]

Looked through my files recently, and oh my, turns out I had this map just lying around, unpublished. So, here it is. Nothing much, just a small and simple one.

[waldronate]

The map is nice, the background scroll is nice, but the two just don't seem to go together. As this is intended to be a picture of a physical element, I would expect that texture of the physical medium to bleed through and roughen the painted-on map and text. It looks much more like a map painted on a thin sheet of glass that was then dropped on top of the scroll and the whole thing photographed. The again, I am known to be rather opinionated on the subject of maps vs pictures of maps, so take that with a pound of salt.

[Daelin]

...the two just don't seem to go together...

I see some validity in that argument. I think that might be the result of mixing two separate elements that each were made not specifically with the intent of mixing. At least that's what I did with this one; I found the parchment via an image search (credit to the creator, I guess, though I have no way of finding out who made it), and thought I'd put a cool-looking map on there. Maybe I could have worked a bit with the opacity or some textures or some-such to make the map look more drawn on the paper than placed. Or I could just eat your comment with that aforementioned flavoring agent. Oh my...

[waldronate]

I think that the biggest issue for me in the combination is the lack of ink bleed on the paper, which is a tough one to do without specialized software (e.g. a paper-based flow map image that the software uses to spread the edges of the ink layer out along the flow map). One way to accomplish something similar to bleed is to use a displacement map near the edges of the main areas to roughen up the edges a bit.

[Daelin]

I think that the biggest issue for me in the combination is the lack of ink bleed on the paper, which is a tough one to do without specialized software (e.g. a paper-based flow map image that the software uses to spread the edges of the ink layer out along the flow map). One way to accomplish something similar to bleed is to use a displacement map near the edges of the main areas to roughen up the edges a bit.

Photoshop could undoubtedly manage this, in hands of a person with the right skills. That person, I am not, sadly. Another thing that might help "blend" the land portion into the parchment is simply to duplicate the parchment layer and overlay atop the land at low/medium opacity, to give it that "drawn-on" feel. It won't achieve the bleed effect, but it will "set" the map into the parchment. If you get my meaning? I just didn't do that, maybe I'll try that now, and post the result.

[arsheesh]

Nice simple map. Good choice of fonts. It works well with the other graphics.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh