The City of Lave

[woekan]

I really like this style. Its a great hand-out for players. I like the parchment. Only thing i would tweak is the outer glow on the numbers on your map.

[Nytmare]

I really like this style. Its a great hand-out for players. I like the parchment. Only thing i would tweak is the outer glow on the numbers on your map.

I had tried to do it without the white, having the area around the numbers fade straight back to the parchment, but I couldn't find something I liked. Nothing seemed to make the numbers stand out from the background as well as that highlight.

[Feralspirit]

Whoa! Very nice work Nytmare. I've been so preoccupied with my own project that I haven't been looking around lately. Couple questions from a novice, if you don't mind sharing.

• What is that you've done to create your walls and towers? I think it would work nicely on my bridge and keep.
• The shadow around the river bank, is this accomplished with a seperate layer? I like the way it makes the river look like it's set below the land.

[Nytmare]

Hmm... It's been about a year since I did this map, let me see if I can figure it out by looking at it.

I'm using Photoshop exclusively, I'm not sure how many of these things translate over to Gimp for you.

For the walls it looks like texture was a combination of Clouds, Noise, Pixilate > Crystalize, and Bluring.

The walls were probably just made with the line tool. I'd imagine that the variations in height along the walls were done by selecting the walls themselves and the interior space and then Select > Contracting and then messing with the brightness and contrast. Rinse, repeat.

The towers look like they were done much the same way. Making the shape, selecting it, contracting the selection, and then futzing with the contrast. It looks like I might have added some shadows (both above and below) after the fact. There are a bunch of ways I might have done that, but I'm not really sure if I should introduce you to my bad habits.

As for the river, I probably did that as a drop shadow. Cutting the space for the water out of the parchment layer, making a layer of "water" under that (transparent blue over a copy of the parchment methinks?), and then sticking an offset shadow between the two layers to add depth.

I really wanted to make it look like everything on the map existed on that piece of paper. Aside from the walls, I wanted it to be able to see the underlying parchment like I was looking at it through transparent inks.