I like it! I hope you'll let us know when you have the podcast ready.
I hope you folks will forgive a bit of thread necromancy here, but this particular subject is what got me on the hunt that led me to this site in the first place (through an entirely roundabout route).
I've loved S.John's map style since I first saw it on his site.. heck, I bought the book on strength of the maps alone. Unfortunately his tutorial on it is for Photoshop, and all I've got to work with is the GIMP.. and as far as I can tell the mode/bitmap trick he uses is one of the few things PS does that I can't get GIMP to duplicate. Help, please! If anyone out there knows how to replicate this in GIMP or Inkscape (I've recently picked it up and it shows promise, but I'm still an utter noob with it), please let me know.
I have had some luck with a layer fill set to dodge/burn, but while that gets the effect of the lines thinning out away from the coast, it doesn't bleed together at the coasts, so I wind up with a sharp edge between drawn out wedges of black.
Thanks for any help, and I'll be sure to post if I work it out for myself.
Thanks a ton, Rob. The newsprint effect is still a little too regular for my tastes, but after fiddling with the displace filter a bit and a few other options, it's definitely a step in the right direction.
Something I discovered: if you're really concerned about the outlines of your shorelines, mask them off before doing the displace. The Y distort will still affect your east-west borders.
I'm experimenting now with using Tools|Color Tools|Threshold.. to add a little more blending between the woodcut lines where they meet the landmass, but that of course drops everything to black & white, which takes a bit of correction. Still, getting there!
RobA - WOW - you just saved me about 3 hours of searching. I had a feeling that if I went through all of the old posts with GIMP in them, I'd find someone who's done something like this. How cool that you did it exactly the same reason I am - following the Zombie videos in GIMP!
Maybe we (OK, you...) should write up how to do Zombie's stuff in GIMP...
Truckin' along...
Alright, I think I got somewhere with this... (click on the picture to see the full size image)
I made my own island (which was a 3 layer chore in and of itself).
Then I airbrushed lightly around the island to create the areas that would be 'cut' out further, similar to what I've seen on Zombie's stuff.
Then I did the newsprint - oh and I made sure that when I did the random clouds, I put the X at zero and Y at largest.
Now the trick will be to do this in the same image that *isn't* grayscale. Not sure how I'm going to tackle that trick.
Last edited by Chgowiz; 04-27-2008 at 12:38 AM.