Stern's Bridge

[jfrazierjr]

Hi. () Sorry to keep everyone (or anyone?) in suspense. I wish I could say that the time I've spent since posting last was clearly evident in this post. Obviously, I cannot. I can say that I'm learning a great deal, but even that is a long slow road (lots of trial and error).

I wanted to throw my map's current state up to see what everyone has to say or suggest. There is still a long list of points that I am not quite happy with. Even so, I think it's progressing towards a state that I will be happy with (I hope).

Thank you to torstan. His user profile holds a beautiful water texture that I promptly jumped on. I thought it would be perfect to add a surface to my river. It wasn't. Sorry torstan, I had to tweak it a little bit, to tone it down. I do think it now serves the purpose I intended very well. Your name, and the original, remain in my patterns dialogue.

I have yet to do anything substantial with Ascension's trees technique, but I continue to think my trees need a little help, so I will probably do some work with his instructions in front of me.

You see that blueish-green area in the NE that kind of runs into the forest, that's supposed to be marsh/swamp. I am still very unhappy with that, but that's the best I've come up with so far. The forest is actually covering a great deal of it, as well. To me, this runs against the point of cartography, which is to convey information, not obscure it. Unless I can figure something out, or one of you can suggest something, I may end up tearing down that part of the forest.



Any and all suggetstions/observations are welcome (read 'needed'), and will be considered in a less-than-timely manner. Thanks.

P.S. The roads and buildings are not in a finished state, I keep the roads up as guides until I figure out what I'm going to do with them. Speaking of buildings, the bevel function generates a dark side on the SE. The only way I've thought of to fix it is to rotate the entire picture 180, bevel, and rotate back. Anyone have anything better?

Good update. One thing you may try to do with this scale so you can maintain your swamp look (I don't really have any ideas about how to make the swamp part itself though) where the trees are is to remove the trees as a amorphous blob(I don't mean that in a bad way) and put down individual trees in a more painterly style. This will let you have some "show through" to the ground below.

Another thing, the ground texture seems to be a bit much. Perhaps have several different textures and hide/show them via the use of a layer mask (each one of course). Right now, the texture is just to repeating for my tastes.

You might also want to think about using a layer mask to "create" your river and have it cover all or more of the layer itself. Then use the layer mask to blur the edges (at specific places if you want) to define the shape of the river. This will let you get some "bleed" through between the swamp and river without such hard lines.

I rather like this start you have...looking forward to seeing more. If you need more on Layer Masks in GIMP, check out my short tutorial via the link in my sig.