How did you make the city symbols? Such as the dots and diamonds etc. seems easy but I can't do it for some reason
Make a brush in Photoshop. Start a new document of say 100 x 100 pixels. Create a new layer. Grab the 1-pixel pencil and draw in your shape (or use some combo of other brushes and erasers). When happy, click Edit > Define Brush Preset. Black pixels become the brush and white pixels will be clear, grays are varying levels of opacity. Not sure of the process in Gimp.
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
No, I use PS CS4... I just can't find the pencil tool for some reason, only the brush, which creates too many grays.
Oh, that...right click on the brush tool and a pop-up appears (pencil and brush are the options).
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
What Ascansion said pretty much, except I used the shape tool and then stroked the outside of the path with whatever sized pencil I needed. I think I went up to 10 a pixel pencil for the symbols that haven't been filled.
Royal: I'm very sorry for your loss, your mother was a terribly attractive woman.
My Cartographer's Guild maps: Finished Maps
More maps viewable at my DeviantArt page: Ramah-Palmer DeviantArt
Oh my god thank you
wow.. sounds like it must have taken a while.. But let me just see if I follow...Originally Posted by Ramah
The mountains and hills were all done with custom brushes I drew. For the mountains I probably had about 20 brushes in the end but only used about a dozen (the rest of them were bad I guess, they never looked right when I placed them). The hills were the same although there were probably less brushes made and used - probably about 10 regular ones used. If you knew the order I did the hills in you could probably see how they become slightly more varied as I added more brushes.
I found making the brushes extremely tedious as I did them with the mouse and it gets a bit soul-destroying having to try and draw another curve that looks ok and then try and shade another large swathe of brush with my non-writing hand. :s So because of that I'd add one or two new ones every few days, hence the hills done at the end having more brushes used.
Personally I think the hills look more varied than the mountains anyway because the only way I could get them to look half decent in my mind was to do the shading between the brushes which make them look more hand drawn.
If/when I do a zoomed in map or maybe another continent in which another story (I once started and never finished) takes place, then I'd LOVE to get myself a tablet and make a better job of the mountains.
You create a custom brush, which is 1 mountian peak, and is only the outline. Once you "paint" that mountain peak where you want it, you then do the shading of the mountain on the canvas (ie. the shading is not part of the brush)..? Is that correct?
The brush can include the shading. I didn't make any adjustments to my mountains (apart from deleting where they overlapped), I just made the brushes and then placed them.
The hills also had shading in the brushes, but then I manually added all the shading between the brushes to give it a more hand-drawn feel.
If you check out the tutorials section, Ironmetal250 recently posted a tut here: http://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=5664 which is basically the same method, except his were hand-drawn and then scanned in and look a helluva lot nicer.
Royal: I'm very sorry for your loss, your mother was a terribly attractive woman.
My Cartographer's Guild maps: Finished Maps
More maps viewable at my DeviantArt page: Ramah-Palmer DeviantArt
A very beautiful map, bravo!
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I just have to say - I absolutely LOVE this map.
Well done!
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