I'd make use of your sketch, even if just as a reference. Put it on its own layer then you can turn it on/off as needed or delete it once you're finished.
I'd make use of your sketch, even if just as a reference. Put it on its own layer then you can turn it on/off as needed or delete it once you're finished.
My Finished Maps | My Challenge Maps | Still poking around occasionally...
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If you need a very, very, very simple starting point, follow these three steps:
1. Create a new photoshop document. Set the background color to blue.
2. Create a new layer. Paint it green.
3. Get your eraser tool out, and start erasing the green layer.
I always start with a black layer for sea and then use one of three methods for making a white land layer.
I either draw the coastline by hand, use some fractal generation (clouds->threashold in PS) or carve it out with an eraser.
The two layers are then copied, and combined to be used as base reference and also added to a new channel for quick selection and other stuff.
I have my main continent on the sea background now, but I'm just not 'feeling it'.
<sigh>
I think my problem comes from the way I'm used to working - nearly everything I have ever worked on was built off of something else. I'm just not used to 'looking at the big picture', or rather, working on a continental scale all at once.
What I may do is start even smalller, with just the main empire that most of the campaign revolves around, and work outward from that.
I think it's because I've always been a gamer first, and cartographer second, that I have this thing where I have to work from a small central point outward (the way an RPG campaign grows).
Anyhow, I'd show a WIP, but right now it just looks like a lot of blue with some colorful blobs added.
Throw it up, we'll give ya some guidance. After all, that's what many commissions look like
If the radiance of a thousand suns was to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...I am become Death, the Shatterer of worlds.
-J. Robert Oppenheimer (father of the atom bomb) alluding to The Bhagavad Gita (Chapter 11, Verse 32)
My Maps ~ My Brushes ~ My Tutorials ~ My Challenge Maps
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