WIP – Volcanic Island

**pasis** · 07-02-2009, 05:55 PM

The smoke is hand drawn with tablet borrowed from my fried. I had several reference pictures mostly found from the quild pages to see how the clouds and smoke is formed.
I started painting with airbrush using a light and dark tone of grey to create roughly spherical shapes. Then I added shades of orange and browns and some white higlights.
I also created few new layers to add 3D feeling the same way as I do with my mountains. This way I got more higlights and shadows in the right places. More details of that technique is found from my tutorial. http://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=4405

I now also played a bit with water and added waves and ripples. Let me know if you don't like it and if I should stick with the previous water version.

**pasis** · 07-05-2009, 04:41 PM

I think I'm now finished with my smoke. I'm happy with it and I cannot make it any better. I tweaked the water a bit more to give it better sun reflection and wave form. I added few rivers and small lakes, but no habitaion yet, it will be next.

And just before posting I added legend too. I usually do that last, but I felt I had to do something else than drawing more rivers or something. I wanted the legend to represent the Island so I made it to look like rusting metal with fire in it.

**zhar2** · 07-05-2009, 04:48 PM

I cant get over how nice that smoke just is

**pasis** · 07-09-2009, 05:30 AM

played around some more with the compass I had created and added some spiral reflections. The reflections are not perfect as I created a separate spiral image and put it overlaying (with clipping mask) the original compass I had, but it look nice anyway.

The spiral image was created by using a freeware tool called Apophysis and even though this is not directly related to map making I thought I could show it anyway.

**pasis** · 07-24-2009, 05:23 PM

Experimenting new things with this map, but I don’t have any real 3D software, so I’ll do it manually with Photoshop. This is a first try and yes I know the wooden texture is too overwhelming / repeating and I need to fix it. I wanted the wooden table to be old and rough with some scratches in it. The effect is ok, but I need to work on the tone and the texture itself.
I’m planning to make the smoke to come out from the map, but in this version I have not processed it yet (and I’m not sure if I can do it but I'll try). I have never mapped anything in 3-D before and this is not actually a real 3D, but just a 2D image in Photoshop, so all comments and critics are more than welcome.

-Pasi