[Photoshop] How do I recreate the stripe on the inter-country borders?

[The_Tragedian]

I'm a massive fan of the alternate history maps made by one Zalring on Deviantart (don't judge me). Their style makes it seem like I could go to some sort of library, pull out a dusty-ass map from the archives, and their maps are what I would find. I love it!

I've been trying to recreate their style for a personal project of mine for some time now. The latest in a series of roadblocks I've had to vault over is the borders between countries. See examples here: https://www.deviantart.com/zalringda...tory-673108724 and https://www.deviantart.com/zalringda...tory-669512528.

I also have a few other questions regarding Zalring's style:
1. The way Zalring renders mountains is gorgeous, but I've had a hard time replicating it. Does anyone know how they did it? Alternatively, you could post another, similar mountain technique.

2. There is a very subtle diagonal hatching texture over most of the map (it's more visible in the first examples). Again, anyone know how to replicate that?

3. Does anyone know how to make the map frame and the latitude/longitude lines?

Thanks in advance!

[Freodin]

It's a very appealing style you have chosen. I hope you will be successful with it.

0. The borders between countries.
This should be one of the simpler things from the technical side, but might get heavy on the work you need to put into it.

Every graphics program should have a function that draws a dotted / patterned line. So all you need to do is adjust this function to the settings that look good, and draw the borders with it.
Now to define these lines: that's more problematic. Within common painting programs - pixel oriented or vector - I can see no other way than to define every single one of these lines by hand.

It should be possibl to simplify that by using a 3-D program to define the basic shapes of the countries, but I haven't tried it out yet.

1. Mountains: again I can only offer partial advise. I have no idea how Zalring did his, but here's what I would try.
Paint the basic hight-map of the mountains as a grayscale map. Either use real world data, or make something up using noise patterns and masks. As far as I know, there are several tutorials on this forum that use such a method to create "relief" style mountains.

Then, look for a "lighting" function in your painting program of choice. In GIMP, for example, this is under Filters/Light and Shadow/Lighting Effects. Don't forget to use your hightmap as a bump-map and experiment to get a good looking and high contrasts lightling.
Raise the contrast to a point where you have almost exclusively black and white, and then use this outcome as a multiply layer with a low opacity.

2. The best way I have found to create a consistent diagonal hatching pattern in a painting program is to draw an orthogonal stripe pattern, distort it slightly (using a noise or a spread function) and then rotate it to the desired angle.
It is quite difficult to get a seamless pattern in this way though, so if you use this method, you can either create a pattern that covers your whole map (even bigger than the final map - you need to account for the rotation), or make patterns at country-size and accept that they won't seamlessly fit at the borders.

There are several ways to colourize such patterns - create them in colour from the start, or do it in black and white and use this pattern as a mask for a coloured layer.

3. The map frame in the examples you gave is just a bunch of linework. Using selections or paths and stroking them is the easiest way to do it.
But I guess your question is aimed more at the lines of the graticule - the longitude and latitude lines with their slants and curves.

There's two basic methods that I would use. First is rather easy to use when doing "real world" maps. Just search the web for a map of your desired area and trace these lines to your map. Straight lines are the easiest to do, for the curves you need to play around with paths, splines or nurbs-curves a little. But you don't have to be too precise... if they fit the original map to a degree, the accuracy is usually enough.

The second method is a lot more complicated, but also more flexible as well as more accurate: do the math.
These lines - their position, form and direction - are based on the projection type you use for your map, and the position and alignment of your map. Each projection can be described by a mathmatical formula. Look it up, calculate your coordinates and draw accordingly.

There are programs out there that can do this for you, but I don't know of any that fit my requirements. NASA's G.Projector can do it, but it is mainly meant for global maps, and I found its scaling for regional maps lacking. But perhaps that's just me, and someone else can give more advice on that.

[The_Tragedian]

Thanks for replying, and if you've gotten a message like this before, just ignore this one. I don't know how the **** to work the reply feature on this website.

Anyways, I'd like a little more clarification on the topic of the border stripe and the diagonal pattern.
1. I've tried giving the dashed line a stroke and a really choked-up inner glow effect in the Fx panel in Photoshop, but neither have worked (proof:https://imgur.com/a/HFr3Qzk). I still am unsure as how to recreate the red line on the country borders—note: not the province borders. I'm talking about the inter-country borders. Do you have any other ideas, and if you don't, could you explain what you said previously a little more, please?

2. What does orthogonal pattern mean? Is that a pattern that's just a perfect square and is a seamless pattern of diagonal lines?

Thanks again!

[Freodin]

There are always several possible approaches to get to similar results, and without knowing the exact way the original artist did his version, it is also almost impossible to get the exact identical results.

I have made attempts at a similar, late 19th century style, some years back, before I had to take a major break for personal reasons.
You can find some intermeditate results here, here, or here.

I guess my workflow is at least something similar to the maps you linked to.

1.
The "inner glow" method does work, but I found it too complicated to set up. I used a basic stroke, with some additions.
For that, you need to have a "selectable" version of your country or province - the shape you want to draw the border around. I used a extra layer that had nothing on each but each seperate country in a clear single colour, exclusively for the purpose of selecting.

When you select one of these shapes, and give it a basic stroke, you will get a thick line on both sides of the borders. So I selected everything but the shape, by simply selecting the shape and inverting the selection, and deleted the unwanted outside parts.

I added a small blur to hide the blocky cut-off sections. Together with the striped black line, this gave a very appealing result.

This method also has the advantage that you can, if you want, add some "imperfections" in the line, by adding a simple jitter effect to the stroke.

2.
By "orthogonal" I meant here either vertical or horizontal lines. It's very easy to construct such a pattern in standard painting programs... they should all have something like a "draw grid" function... and then you simply need to set it up so that only vertical or horizontal lines are drawn.

It is also possible to add variations to these lines in this form, like a regular striped pattern, by combining several carefully adjusted grid. Something like that is almost impossible to do on diagonal lines.

So make up the stripe pattern that you want with vertical / horizontal lines, and only then rotate it.

It is possible to create a seamless texture from such a pattern, regardless of the angle. You just have to figure out where to cut the pattern. Trial and error is the simplest way to do that.

[Freodin]

Hm.
I had a short exchange with Zalring, and he told me that the reason why he doesn't do extensive tutorials is that he is exclusively using GIMP, and had found his methods do not always translate very well into other programs like Photoshop.

I wouldn't have though it that difficult, but it seems he is right.

In my last post, I advised to use the "Render Grid" function to create a hatching pattern. Now it seems that PS doesn't even have such a function to simply create a grid pattern.

Zalring himself told me that he used GIMP's "Newsprint" filter (with the addition of some unspecified other filters) to create his hatching pattern. GIMP's "Newsprint" is similar to Photoshop's "Half tone" function... but it seems PS does only allow for a dotted pattern, not a striped one.

So I have to admit that I am stumped here. I know how to do these things with the tools I use... but I have no clue how to do them in PS.

If there isn't anyone with a better idea, I would advise to download the completely free GIMP, create a pattern there and add it as a layer or pattern in PS.