1-day experiment

[Ascension]

I had half of the day off today (bad back) so I had some new theories to test out - trying to push the artsy thing even further...ie getting closer to a hand-painted look.

The first image is my base terrain; my normal sat-style with some lighter colors and I drew ridge lines on the mountain layer before hitting the lighting effects. I airbrushed in some shadows to give them some drama, put some waves in the deserts for fun, and then painted over the desert band with some green to constrict it's shape. With a clouds filter, dry brush filter, and tan/brown gradient map I added some splotches. For the stroke I took a path from selection then stroked it with a 5-pixel soft round brush with a bit of spacing and scatter on it. The forests are a 3-pixel soft round brush with max scatter options and then lightly texture-beveled and given a very soft green color.

The second image is a bunch of filters - reticulation, watercolor, diffuse, and some blending options across duplicate layers. The light colors might be a bit too intense but I'm not sure how I want to go about changing them just yet. I also put the rivers on last because they get lost in the filters, like my sand dunes, and started putting in locations. I had political borders drawn out but I didn't like em so I scrapped em. Tomorrow night I'll finish putting places in and start labeling.