[Award Winner] Antique-style maps in Photoshop

[Ascension]

3. This part is a little tedious but necessary…rivers (ugh). On the layers palette ctrl-click on the “land” layer. Create a new layer and rename it to “rivers”. Make sure you have the pencil tool and not the brush tool and grab the “Hard square 2 pixels” tip. On the Brushes palette, click on “Brush tip shape” and set the spacing to 1%. With black draw a bunch of squiggles starting in the ocean and going inland…since we have a selection of our land layer the lines will only be drawn on the land and not the ocean. Change over to a 1-pixel tip for minor rivers and don’t forget to put in forks and branches in the rivers ((pic antique 5)). By defining our rivers first we can use the open space left over for the mountains, swamps, deserts, etc.

4. Mountains are a two-step process. Create a new layer and rename it to “mountains 1”. Still using the pencil grab a big tip, I’m going with the default Soft round 27-pixels. Check your spacing on the tip and set it to 1% if you need to. Draw in some basic lines, not shapes ((pic antique 6)). Create a new layer and rename it to “mountains 2”. Change from the pencil to a brush and use the default Hard round 3-pixels and set the flow at 100%. Zoom in to 100%. Now add a bunch of cilia (hair) around the outside of the mountain line…it should look like a paramecium ((pic antique 7)). When done, hide the “mountains 1” layer and take the 2 off of the other mountains layer. Now our basic topography is done. A more modern take on this approach is to taper the lines. To do this, click on the Brushes tab then click on Shape Dynamics. Underneath the Size Jitter is a box that will probably say “Pen pressure”…change this to Fade and set the amount of how much you want the taper to be.